


apotheosis

by aerynlallaboso



Series: apocrypha [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Medium Chaos (Dishonored)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8572594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: They’re running, barely managing not to stumble over their own feet as they go, and there are guards chasing them through their own home, past stunned civilians and servants. Dunwall Tower has been invaded. It was a success.(The Fifteenth year of the reign of Empress Emily Kaldwin, First of her Name - or if you prefer, the First of the reign of rightful Empress Delilah Kaldwin - is remembered in the history books as the year a vicious coup d'état stranded the young Empress's father on the other side of the Isles from his daughter. But history books, as anyone will tell you, often have selective memories.)[hiatused/extremely slow updates]





	1. prologue: 16th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to the New Fic
> 
> this is a direct sequel to my previous long dh work and will obviously contain references to it (we're in full canon divergence territory now boys) + will also contain spoilers for dishonored 2, which i have beaten four times already, the corroded man, and the wyrmwood deceit. i don't really want to just be reiterating the events of the game so spoilers for dh2 might end up being fairly light until mid/late-game territory, but we'll see how it goes. ch 1 is already underway and i'm a lot more confident about writing longfic after the success of ico so buckle up.........

The corpse has a cloth bag over its head, and it’s probably a mercy.

 

The condition of the rest of the body is, to say the least, not good, despite it being found relatively soon after death. A half an hour or so if the witness statement is accurate, and it looks it.  _ There was someone wearing a hooded cloak, and I swear, I think he was eating up Mr Boyle’s guts. _

 

Ichabod Boyle’s stomach is ripped open. The stench of offal and blood is eye-wateringly strong; several Watch officers have come and gone in the fifteen minutes Corvo has been here, the fifteen minutes he has spent examining the corpse in great detail and noting all the hallmarks that prove this body to be the work of the bloodthirsty menace known as the Crown Killer.

 

He winces. More fuel for the newspapers. “Officer Horn,” he says.

 

The man who escorted him here from the street-side entrance to Dunwall Tower, barely a minute’s walk down the road, stands to attention. His short nose is screwed tight against the fumes of the crime scene before them. “Lord Attano.”

 

“What was the Watch patrol doing today that this could happen so close to the tower?” Corvo says. He keeps his voice light, but Horn blanches instantly. “I’ll be asking Ramsey later, I’m sure, but if you have any insights, I’d like to hear them. The Empress’s security is of utmost importance at a time like this.” An edge insinuates itself into his tone. “I don’t like the Crown Killer murdering a noble right on our doorstep so close to the late Empress’s day of remembrance.”

 

“It’s - a tragedy,” Horn gets out. “A deep shame, Royal Protector. You’re right.” He swallows, looks around at the wood-panelled walls spattered with blood and at the other Watch officers going over Boyle’s documents past the open ceiling on the floor above. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure that the men assigned to patrol past here were paying proper attention today. They’re fine men, fine people. But wasting half an hour fining a witness for up-chucking-”

 

_ Paid off _ .  _ The Crown Killer seems to have deep pockets. _ “Alright, thank you, Officer Horn. I’ll be talking to you again later in private, if you don’t mind.”

 

Horn nods shakily and heads off towards the stairs. Going to confer with his fellow officers, no doubt. Corvo turns back to contemplate the body of Ichabod Boyle again, eyeing his wounds with distaste. Whoever the Crown Killer is, they don’t just enjoy their work - they revel in it, they savour it. They take pieces as souvenirs and roll in the mess they leave behind. And there are some in the city who think it’s him.

 

He did kill a Boyle, once, but that was a very long time ago and it was  _ clean _ and her body has rotted to dust by now.

 

Corvo shakes his head in disgust and makes for the front door.

 

Outside, there are onlookers gathering, held back by the Watch checkpoints set up near the door. Two officers nod at Corvo as he passes; he ignores them. He doesn’t know if they’re newly arrived, or if they were the men supposed to be patrolling this street when the Crown Killer butchered someone not two blocks away from his home. He has to talk to Ramsey about this as soon as possible, and Alexi. Corruption within the City Watch is nothing new, he supposes, but the strength of it right now is worrying. He doesn’t have the time to be tracking down guards individually and giving them their due.

 

The day is fine and sunny as he passes the rest of the checkpoints and rounds the path up to the tower’s main entrance. His thoughts are typically heavy - counting the steps from the door of the Boyle house to the door of his own, the steps the Crown Killer would have to take to burst through the front entrance and slaughter Emily’s guards. They wouldn’t get past him, though. Or if they did, they’d have Emily herself to contend with.

 

Alexi greets him at the foot of the stairs to the second floor. Her uniform is immaculate, as always; Corvo fights the urge to brush imaginary specks of dust off his own asymmetrical jacket. “Lord Protector,” she says. “You smell of blood. I heard it was bad.”

 

“Very bad, Captain Mayhew. Someone will have to clean it up before the Ladies Boyle come around to see their nephew, or they might faint there and then.”

 

“Both of them?”

 

“You never know,” Corvo says. “But it was very, very bad,” he adds grimly. “Second only to that old couple. If the Crown Killer is even human, they’re one of the nastiest beasts I’ve ever come across in all my years.”

 

“You’ll catch them,” Alexi tells him. The confidence in her voice is inspiring, and he is reminded of her age - she is twenty-five, an old friend of Emily’s, still young enough to not have seen all of the horrors that Dunwall and beyond have to offer, though she is far from naive. A naive woman would never have made Captain in the City Watch.

 

He smiles at her. “I’m sure we will. They can’t get away with dumping a body practically on the Empress’s doorstep. Where is she this morning, by the way? Her schedule didn’t say.”

 

Years ago, Corvo wouldn’t have needed a schedule to know Emily’s whereabouts. He could’ve switched on his altered vision with the flick of a mental switch, spotted her gold-shaded figure with ease amongst the hundreds of people in Dunwall Tower with ease by the way she moves and holds herself. Nowadays, he is no longer possessed of the dangerous luxury of supernatural powers, and Emily finds it increasingly easier to slip her leash to train on her own. It worries him.

 

There is a step on the stairs above them; a voice calls, “Her Imperial Majesty is right here,” and then his dearest daughter is vaulting gracefully over the railing in her leather pants and long, tailored coat and landing equally gracefully beside him, leaving her guards standing mildly bemused further up the stairs. “I was writing letters,” Emily informs him. “An hour dedicated to them. Several to the governors of the various Isles thanking them for their efforts on mother’s day of remembrance, one to Cynthia, one to Anton, and one to Wyman.”

 

“Empresses shouldn’t vault stairs in public,” Corvo says. Alexi is smirking. “Why were you writing to Sokolov?”

 

Emily waves off her two guards, pointing to Corvo and Alexi, and the man and woman bow to her and head for their quarters. She begins to walk in the same direction; he matches her pace. “I haven’t heard from him in quite a while,” she says. “You know we’ve been exchanging letters every few months, father. Mostly he just sends snippets of news or lessons. He likes hearing about things back here, especially how Doctor Toksvig and my Royal Arcanist are getting on.”

 

“Snoop,” Alexi comments. She is trailing behind them, hands held behind her back.

 

“I sent the last letter nearly two months ago and he hasn’t replied, so I decided to write another. Does that satisfy you, father?”

 

Corvo rubs his chin as they walk. Two months - perhaps he should have one of his agents check on the old man, just in case. His planned recovery trip to Serkonos after the incident with the former High Overseer seven years ago resulted in a more permanent arrangement, and Doctor Toksvig has filled the role of Royal Physician admirably since then. He is still guiltily glad that Sokolov made himself scarce just as Dunwall Tower became host to the one secret Corvo would rather Sokolov never find out about. “For now,” he says.

 

They reach Emily’s destination - the kitchen, from which the smell of a fresh fruit delivery is emanating pleasantly. Alexi nods to the both of them and takes her leave. “The Royal Arcanist was out today,” Emily says, her hand resting on the kitchen door’s handle.

 

“Really? That’s unusual.”

 

She sighs. “I think he’s waiting for you in your office. He bought something. He wanted me to see it, but I was busy. Besides, I’m sure whatever it is would be best seen somewhere where there wasn’t an Overseer in the room. I can barely keep convincing them not to arrest him in the first place, you know. He might as well be called the Court Heretic.”

 

“It’s his own damn fault,” Corvo says, and they both shake their heads.

 

Emily’s hand on the kitchen door fiddles with the handle. “I’ve not been feeling well lately,” she says, suddenly subdued. “Not physically, I mean. I feel like something bad is going to happen soon. It’s probably just jitters because of the anniversary of mother’s death, I know, but-”

 

“It’ll be fine,” he reassures her. “I’m talking to High Overseer Khulan later about extra security. Alexi and Captain Ramsey and I have everything well in hand. If something goes wrong, you know I’ll be right beside you.”

 

“I know. I just can’t help looking up at the sky.” Emily shivers, smoothes down her coat. “I feel like there’s a storm coming. Wasn’t it you who told me to trust my gut when I had bad feelings like this?”

 

It was, more than once. He can’t count on one hand the number of times he wishes he’d listened to his own instincts, trusted the tingles in his spine that told him that something was wrong. “I’ll move up my meeting with the High Overseer. Make sure we have properly equipped Overseers at the ceremony in two days.”

 

“Thank you, father.” She smiles at him, and adds, “I’ll see you later,” before descending into the kitchen. Corvo hears the expected cries of ‘Empress!’ - the cooks and servants have always liked Emily - as he turns and starts for the stairs again.

 

For a long time, Corvo was uneasy about the thought of sleeping and working in the same place as Hiram Burrows, although the late Spymaster and Regent’s chambers were his by right of title. He had kept his previous rooms for several years, a small and crowded office with adjoining bedchamber, and managed in them, testing his ingenuity in cramming more and more papers into stuffed drawers and bookshelves. But then, one memorable night, he had had to find a place to house the now Royal Arcanist after the idiot got himself arrested for heresy at the boarding house he was staying in. It had seemed natural to have him move into Corvo’s chambers, and then equally natural for Corvo himself to finally stake his claim on the large room at the heart of the tower.

 

The first thing he did was hang the painting of Serkonos that occupies the wall behind his desk, to remind him of home. The second thing he did was move in his bed, which is where the Royal Arcanist is sitting when he lets himself into his room. “Good morning,” he says.

 

“Hello, Corvo,” the Outsider murmurs. 

 

His desk is relatively free of paperwork this morning. Corvo sits down at it and pulls out his fountain pen and a sheet of stationery to begin a letter to the High Overseer. “I hear you went out,” he calls to the Outsider.

 

The former god of the Void is cross-legged on the edge of Corvo’s bed, turning something over in his hands. The thing Emily said he bought, no doubt; from where he sits, Corvo can see that it is carved and the dirty white of a bonecharm, but not. This object is circular and has a hand attached to it, like a clock or a compass. “I did. To Wyrmwood Way.”

 

“Wyrmwood-”

 

“Did you know your  protégé was there before she disappeared? She was attacked by a shade in a painting and lived.”  He has discarded the tinted spectacles and high scarf he usually wears around court to hide his horrifyingly black eyes and the thin scar around his neck, a usual practice when he comes to Corvo’s room. “Very impressive.”

 

Corvo’s mood turns wary instantly. “I did. You know I know that. I searched that building top to bottom and questioned half the shopkeepers on that street this past month. What is that?”

 

The hand on the object ticks. “It detects disturbances in the Void,” the Outsider says. “Truly a powerful thing to be able to reach beyond the walls of this reality and into that one.” His lips quirk in one of those rare, genuine smiles. “I always knew her work would be good enough to survive the burning of the city.”

 

The hand ticks again, sharper and more insistent. “It looks to be detecting something right now.”

 

The Outsider doesn’t respond. His eyes stare at the compass-clock-bone-charm like those of a man possessed; then, his gaze breaks. He puts it down. “How are you today, Corvo? I didn’t ask.”

 

Small-talk never fails to unnerve him coming from the Outsider. Seven years since the day he walked out of the Wrenhaven, descended from the Void into the body of a man Corvo killed for him, and yet he still doesn’t act precisely like a human being. Most of the servants in the tower are terrified of him; for that matter, so are the guards, and in fact everyone who crosses his path. And that’s with all his most distinguishing marks hidden. “I’m well.”

 

“Good.” He swings up off the bed, leaving the object behind, and takes the chair sat in front of Corvo’s desk to watch him write. “How are the security preparations progressing?”

 

_ Khulan _ , Corvo scratches onto the paper. “You don’t need to know that,” he says. “But they’re almost complete. Ramsey’s been uncooperative lately, like he has a chip on his shoulder.”  _ I need to see you sooner than I’d asked. It’s about the Overseer presence at the day of remembrance. _ “Alexi takes up his slack, though. She’s an extremely competent young woman.”  _ I know they went back into the vault after the incident last year, but I’d like you to dig out a couple of Music Boxes. _

 

“As competent as Martha Cottings,” the Outsider observes, and Corvo pauses his writing to peer at him. “Already nearly as dedicated to Emily as you are. I wonder that you didn’t choose a second pupil after her disappearance.”

 

“Not Alexi,” Corvo says shortly. “It couldn’t be her.”

 

The Outsider leans across the desk a little as Corvo returns to the letter and says, “Of course not. You’d feel bad recruiting one of Emily’s friends like that.  _ Corrupting  _ her. She would have to start keeping secrets from her. She would have to keep from her exactly what it takes to make her safe.”

 

“Something like that,” Corvo replies without looking up.

 

Neither of them say anything else while he finishes writing, puts down his pen and seals the letter in an envelope. A long time ago, this would’ve been the part where the Outsider vanished into thin air, back into the Void until the next time he showed up to deliver one of his speeches. Now, the Void is empty, and he sits in his chair in front of Corvo’s desk with his legs crossed and a thoughtful, faraway look in his deep black eyes.

 

“Corvo,” the Outsider says.

 

“Mmm?”

 

He gestures behind him at the object on the bed. “You were right. It is detecting something, but I’m not sure what it is. I’d advise you to be on your guard.”

 

“I’m always on my guard.” Corvo returns his pen to its stand and folds his arms. “It’s nice to hear you say that.”

 

The Outsider rocks back in his chair slightly, meeting Corvo’s eyes. “Nice to hear me say… what? That we could be in grave danger? Or that you should be on your guard?”

 

“Both. With no riddles attached.”

 

“I could add one, if you’d prefer,” and he reaches across the desk again to pat one of Corvo’s hands. His own are that peculiar icy cold that they’ve always been, as if his body’s brief sojourn in the river years ago was enough for the water to soak into his skin and freeze beneath it. He usually wears gloves; they, like his scarf and spectacles, are nowhere to be seen in Corvo’s chambers.

 

Here, he seems to feel he has nothing to hide, and Corvo feels the same. “No thank you,” he says, taking the Outsider’s hand and clasping it in his with the smallest of smiles. Then he recalls his earlier conversation with Emily and frowns. “I was… talking to Em, before, and she said she was having bad feelings. A premonition, you could say. It might not mean anything.”

 

The Outsider says, “Emily is not Void-touched; nor is she a witch, but her father was once Marked and she currently retains me as an advisor. She’s likely as close to the Void as it’s possible to be without being one of those two things.” His thoughtful expression twists. “This disturbance, that’s coming. It’s going to be very bad.”

 

“Do you know if there’s anything we can do to stop it? Or find out what it is?” Corvo can feel the Outsider’s cold hand leeching his warmth, but he doesn’t let go. The touch is grounding. “My agents can’t exactly scout the Void, but there has to be something. Things there don’t happen without affecting this world. Like the storm when you fell.”

 

“Nothing you aren’t already doing. Be careful.”

 

Again, Corvo senses a break in their conversation, a spot where the Outsider would dissolve were he still a god. He can’t stop himself from pointing out those places mentally, so that he can be glad when he is still there. “I hope it stays away until after the eighteenth,” he says. “Until after I’m done with the security for Emily’s ceremony. We probably won’t be that lucky, will we?”

 

“I doubt it,” the Outsider tells him, and he’s right.

  
Two days later, everything goes to hell.


	2. chapter one: 18th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im never writing another chapter in 4 days ever again probably so enjoy this? thx for the comments on the prologue, they're always appreciated!
> 
> as a quick aside, toksvig, the royal physician mentioned in this chapter, is taken from the corroded man, while the other character who appears towards the end of the chapter is original and made a brief appearance in my previous fic.

It’s all going to plan, initially. Corvo meets Emily at the door to the throne room, Alexi opening the doors for her and ushering her inside. The room is not packed, but there are enough important visitors inside to just about hide the size of the City Watch presence. Two Overseers flank Yul Khulan, waving incense over Jess’s memorial.

 

They lay roses before her portrait, and Corvo tells her courage, to himself as well. Fifteen years ago, on this day-

 

_ Yes, he’s killed the Empress! What did you do with young lady Emily, traitor? _

 

Jessamine’s expression in her portrait makes his heart ache. She’s not quite smiling, the picture of regal beauty. He misses her.

 

Emily takes the throne for her second speech. Corvo takes his place beside her. He knows the positions of every person in this room, Alexi in the left corner and Ramsey in the right - except, when he turns his head, Ramsey isn’t where he’s supposed to be. Two City Watch are in his place by the door that leads to the Royal Chambers. Where has the man gone to?

 

“The Royal Arcanist,” the herald announces.

 

Corvo’s head snaps back around to see the Outsider, dressed from head to toe in black, enter through the throne room doors. Some of the nobles at the edges of the room begin to titter immediately upon seeing him; he pays no notice, taking long-legged strides up the red carpet to lay a pink rose before Jessamine’s picture.

 

He isn’t supposed to be here. The tiny twist in his gut when he couldn’t see Ramsey curls itself tighter, and he says as much when the Outsider takes a spot to the side of Emily’s throne, stepping to him and lowering his voice. “What are you doing here?”

 

“The disturbance in the Void,” the Outsider says quietly. His mouth barely moves. Corvo’s goes dry.

 

The herald says, with a hint of surprise, “His Grace Luca Abele, Duke of Serkonos.”

 

The throne room goes silent as the doors swing open again, and Luca Abele, a man Corvo has not seen in years, the man who currently rules his homeland, enters. He isn’t supposed to be here either, certainly not trailed by two abominations of wood and steel with swords for arms. They stand taller than every man in the room; with every step they take, he hears the ticking of a clock and the dull thud of metal on metal as they clap their swords together.

 

Emily is motionless on her throne beside him, but he can sense her moving, coiling herself up. She knows the something bad she was telling him about has arrived, with a red-curtained palanquin drawn by City Watch following him.

 

“What is this?” Corvo says, loudly. “I didn’t authorise those  _ things _ -”

 

Duke Abele interrupts him to address Emily directly. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he says. Corvo had forgotten his voice - thick, a classically aristocratic Serkonan accent masking brutishness. “On this tragic day, I visit you from Serkonos to offer my condolences. And to bring you a gift which I hope will raise your spirits. The greatest gift of all, in fact. Family.”

 

Tittering from the assembled civilians again. They must all be thinking of the last time someone gave a speech like this in Dunwall Tower, on Emily’s eighteenth birthday, but this time is different. Corvo has no idea what Abele is playing at. He doesn’t know where Ramsey is, or who is in that palanquin.

 

“I present,” Abele declares. “The long-lost sister of Jessamine Kaldwin.”

 

The Outsider is at his shoulder. “ _ Corvo _ ,” he whispers, hisses. “We need to go,  _ now _ .”

 

“Delilah Kaldwin,” the Duke finishes. He flourishes, and the red curtains draw aside to reveal a woman with short brown hair, dressed in black with red roses framing her face and neck, who steps onto the throne’s pale blue carpet as if she was born to it. “Your rightful Empress.”

 

It is as if time has narrowed to a single point, a small beam that encompasses only himself and Abele and Emily and this woman Delilah who is sashaying her way towards the throne, past Jessamine’s portrait. Jessamine, who didn’t have a sister. Who couldn’t possibly have had a sister. Corvo reaches for Emily’s arm.

 

“Going somewhere, Lord Protector?”

 

_ Ramsey _ . Ramsey with his sword drawn, suddenly between Corvo and Emily and the door to the rest of this building. On the other side of the room, he can see Alexi out of the corner of his eye draw her own sword and mouth something. “You bastard,” Corvo says quietly.

 

“I believe it’s our dear Lady Emily who’s the bastard here,” Ramsey drawls, loud enough that the entire throne room can hear him.

 

Emily is still sitting stock-still. “My mother didn’t have a sister,” she says, ignoring Ramsey, staring straight at the newcomer Delilah. “Who are you?”

 

“The daughter of Emperor Euhorn Jacob Kaldwin.” Her voice is deep, biting. “Jessamine was my younger sister, and you, Emily, are my dearest niece. It’s good to finally meet you in the flesh. At the time of your mother’s death, I was too - overcome to make myself known to her remaining family, but now I return to Dunwall.” Delilah swings around, opens her arms wide. “My home.”

 

He can see Alexi, closing in from the side and making her presence known to Emily with a brief touch on her arm. “It’s not true,” he says flatly.

 

“Royal Protector,” Delilah croons. “Little black sparrow. The both of you blackened by memories of my dear sister,” and then her tone turns vicious in an instant. “I’m here to relieve you of your duties.”

 

They move in the same instant, he and his daughter, on their feet with weapons out. Someone, a noble in the back of the hall, screams; Corvo can see a few of the men he assigned pull out their swords, too, uncertainly. Some of them do nothing at all.  _ Paid off, like the ones who looked the other way for the Crown Killer’s slaughter _ . “Traitorous  _ dog _ ,” he says, to Ramsey in front of him.

 

Ramsey swings first, a stab that might’ve hit Emily if Alexi weren’t there in front of her. The sword enters her in her upper abdomen and does not exit and she gasps, and there are more screams from the people in the throne room as Delilah Kaldwin -  _ she can’t be _ \- raises her arms again and calls, “Hear me, all of you. Your rightful Empress has returned!”

 

“All hail the Empress Delilah Kaldwin, First of her Name!” is Luca Abele. Corvo barely has time to feel the disgust and cold rage seething through his veins at the thought of Theodanis’s son attempting to unseat his own daughter before Ramsey is pivoting, trying to strike at him. He blocks it; across the way Alexi’s body falls backwards, onto Emily, and he doesn’t have time to be worried for them, either. If only he could stop time, if only he could Blink.

 

This is a nightmare.

 

Delilah turns yet again, back to them. She is smiling, a hungry, triumphant smile, skin drawn tight over her cheekbones. “Corvo Attano,” she says. “What a threat you might have been to me, in past times. But now the Void is empty, isn’t it? The Mark of the Outsider means nothing when there is no Outsider.” She holds up her hand; a briar of black wood erupts from the ground in front of the throne. “And I don’t need a god to give me power. You’re  _ finished _ .”

 

“ _ Delilah Copperspoon. _ ”

 

The smile drops from her lips.

 

“You can’t do this,” the Outsider says, stepping out of the shadow of the throne, pulling off his spectacles. “I won’t let you.” Black eyes glittering in the light that shines off the swords of Duke Abele’s mechanical soldiers.

 

Delilah stares at him for a long moment. She must have been Marked, or visited, or something like that, she must be a witch. ‘Copperspoon’ rings a bell in Corvo’s head the way ‘Delilah’ doesn’t. He can’t think of anything right now besides his daughter holding the body of her friend, from which the lifeblood is slowly ebbing.

 

“You’re not possible,” Delilah says to the Outsider. “That’s - you’re -” She takes a step back. “ _ You’re _ -”

 

It’s an opportunity. Corvo seizes it. He presses forward at Ramsey, who is gaping openly at the Outsider, who isn’t good enough to block the stab that rips through his shoulder, and then to Emily. “ _ The docks _ ,” he whispers to her. “ _ Get out of Dunwall _ ,” before Delilah’s black briar drags him away from his daughter. He cuts at it with his sword, gaze swinging wildly, from Emily hauling Alexi over her shoulder and running to the Outsider snatching Delilah’s hand as she tries to conjure another briar to restrain Emily.

 

Delilah grabs the Outsider’s hand on hers, nails digging deep. “If you are what you look like,” she spits, and she’s smiling. “Then I’ll have to thank you before I kill you.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” the Outsider tells her. He’s angry, really and truly angry, just before Delilah pulls a small, curved knife out of her outfit and brings it down like a butcher’s hatchet on the last two joints of the Outsider’s little finger.

 

The Outsider  _ screams _ . Corvo pulls himself free of the black briar and moves, wrenching at the Outsider, trying to get him away from Delilah - he gets a good hold on his wrist, and they both start to run. Past Delilah, who holds the flesh and bone she just cut away in a tight grip. The mechanical soldiers are amongst the civilians at the ceremony now, swords flashing.

 

There are guards chasing them as they run across the roof of Dunwall Tower. Across the roof of their own home. Corvo runs one through with his sword when he tries to trip the Outsider and keeps moving, for the door that leads to the upper level of the tower, the staircase and beyond. He jams it behind them - “This should keep them a minute,” he says - with the sword of the man he just killed.

 

Halfway down the staircase, they find Alexi.

 

“Lord Protector,” she rasps. There is blood streaming from her torso wound; she must be in incredible pain, and yet she reaches up to them. “Lord Corvo, I-”

 

“Where’s Emily?”

 

“I told her to leave me.” Alexi coughs. Beside him, the Outsider is shivering slightly, and dark red drips from the end of his finger. They only have a minute before the guards break through that door, he thinks. “Told her there was a captain at the docks this morning. Looking for you. She’ll be okay. I’m sorry I-”

 

“You have nothing to apologise for, Alexi,” Corvo says. His heart lurches as her eyelids flutter and close, but when he fumbles for a pulse at her throat, he finds one. It’s irregular, thready. They need to find her medical attention as soon as possible, though Void knows where or how. He can feel himself retreating back into the mindset of the man he was fifteen years ago, on the run from Coldridge Prison with only the most tenuous of hopes that he would survive the next twenty-four hours.

 

The Outsider touches his shoulder, and there’s a thud from upstairs. The door. “We need to go,” he says.

 

They emerge onto the second floor of the tower, and Corvo can feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins - he’s moving quickly, even with Alexi’s prone body now over his shoulders. She’s an extra incentive to move fast, because the sword Ramsey stuck through her hasn’t killed her.  _ Yet _ , his brain reminds him.

 

A man opens a glass door right as Corvo is about to slam through it; the force of the opening door knocks him back. He almost drops Alexi, but the Outsider grabs his arm and hauls him forward, pushing the man out of the way. They keep running. They’re nearly to the front entrance, and Ramsey can’t have every man in the city on his payroll. The Duke’s payroll. Delilah Copperspoon’s payroll - he cannot, will not call her a Kaldwin.

 

The wood-panelled walls of the first floor of the tower give way to the huge open space and inset steps that form the main entrance hall. There is nobody here, and Corvo’s head would be ringing alarm bells if it weren’t already screaming sirens at him. This must’ve been planned for months, probably longer than he’s been planning the ceremony itself.

 

Alexi’s weight is heavy on him as he shoves open the tower’s doors, steps out into the afternoon sun with the Outsider by his side. The sky is slightly overcast; the tower grounds are eerily, terrifyingly empty, and as they head east, curving around to the street-side exit of the grounds, they can see why.

 

“Void take us all,” Corvo breathes, looking at the bodies of thirty City Watch at least, half the garrison stationed just outside the tower. Slaughtered by the Duke’s mechanical soldiers or by their own fellows for cold, hard coin. “Void take  _ Delilah _ , whoever she is.” He shoots a look at the Outsider. “You know her, don’t you?”

 

The Outsider grimaces. His hand is still wrapped tight around his mutilated finger. “Now isn’t the time, Corvo. We have to get out of here before your men catch up with us. Do you know somewhere we can go?”

 

He might. “I do,” Corvo says.

 

~

 

Making it to the carriage line is easier than he expects, with two other people with him. Last time he escaped somewhere as heavily guarded as Dunwall Tower, he was alone. He’s always been alone when he goes in on the types of missions he wears the mask for - and how he wishes he’d been able to retrieve it before they left. He should’ve kept it close. Now he’s stuck with his own face, a fairly ordinary but still recognisable one, keeping his head down, and to make matters worse the Outsider’s tinted spectacles are lying somewhere on the floor back in Emily’s throne room.

 

_ Emily _ . Corvo wants to go to the docks, to see if the ship Alexi mentioned is still there. To ask someone if they saw the Empress of the Isles successfully fleeing her city to safety. He catches a glimpse as they glide overhead in the carriage, Alexi unconscious and slumped on the seat opposite him. He took off his jacket and bound her wound tightly, fed her the last elixir he had on him. It won’t be enough to keep her alive if they can’t get more.

 

“Where are we going?” the Outsider asks. He’s sat next to Corvo. His wound, too, will fester without elixir, rot his entire hand off. At least he’d be without the Mark he gave Levi all those years ago just before Corvo killed him. It’s always struck him as very ironic, the Outsider wearing his own Mark on his hand. “Corvo?”

 

He’s losing his train of thought. “We’ll stop before we reach the station,” he says. “They may well be waiting for us, or cut the power halfway there anyhow. There’s an apartment further down the district we can stay for a few days. Sealed during the plague.”

 

Below, the streets of Dunwall look much the same as always. The carriage track rolls above grey-white stone, high buildings of pale brick and stone with black metal balconies tacked on years afterwards. They have already passed the docks, and the river - the ocean - is only an occasional glimpse of greenish-blue between homes and businesses. He can still smell it, though. Dunwall is saturated with the scent of salt and oil; one day, the water will come lapping up over the shore and bring them all down into the sea. He dreams about it sometimes.

 

The clocktower is getting closer. Corvo surveys their surroundings, waits until the carriage is within jumping distance of a balcony to their right, then pulls the carriage lever. It rattles to a stop. “We’re getting off.”

 

The Outsider clambers out first, holding out his arms to take Alexi’s unconscious body. Corvo makes the transfer very carefully. The Watch captain’s face is incredibly pale, almost a match for the Outsider’s unnatural complexion. His jacket tied around her ribs and waist slips as he passes her over. He grabs it and throws it beside them before climbing onto the balcony himself.

 

Whoever owns the house they are about to invade has kindly left their outside doors unlocked.  _ Nobles _ . The time of the Rat Plague has passed out of the memory of the rich and mostly unaffected; the newer generation have no recollection of having their elixir reserves and armouries plundered by a masked man who could scale any height. He reties his jacket around Alex’s wound before they go in.

 

The doors squeak. Corvo looks left and right, though his vision is impaired by the body slung over his shoulder once more. It would be better if the Outsider were carrying her, but Alexi is taller than he is.

 

The stairs squeak too, when they find them, past ornate doors that lead to bedrooms and drawing rooms and whatever the rich people who live here have chosen to fill their house with. They have taste, at least - a painting of a Tyvian skyline catches Corvo’s eye in particular. It reminds him of Sokolov, who hasn’t replied to Emily’s letters. Sokolov who lives in Serkonos now, the same place governed by Duke Luca Abele.

 

He curses under his breath. They round a landing, keeping their tread soft. So far there isn’t any sign of the occupants of this house being home, but there’s no need to invite attention.

 

As they reach ground level, his caution is proven correct. The staircase opens into a wide front room with cream-coloured walls hung with mirrors and landscape lithographs, and on a rich brown leather lounge a few metres from the door sleeps a noblewoman who looks vaguely familiar. The scene is almost picturesque, and it turns his blood cold.

 

This woman won’t be sleeping much longer. She might not be living here much longer, or if she is, there’ll be mechanical soldiers at her door, the voice of Delilah echoing over the loudspeakers in the city streets. Dunwall is under new leadership again and there will be changes. Walls of Light and watchtowers at checkpoints like fifteen years ago. The landscape dug up, scarred irrevocably. This woman won’t even have the worst of it. She’s rich.

 

Corvo tightens his grip on Alexi and tiptoes to the front door, the Outsider close on his heels.

 

~

 

The sleeping woman lives on a street three blocks back from the canal that runs past the Boyle Mansion. He knows it relatively well, mostly from the rooftops, but it feels a good deal longer than the city’s maps show it to be when you’re running down it like he and the Outsider do. He can’t catch his breath, can’t stop to reassure the worried citizens of this district who unfortunately see them that this woman isn’t dead and he’s the Royal Protector and you need to get out of the city before the Duke’s paid-off men find you.

 

Three blocks. They should’ve stayed on the top floor, jumped to another balcony. It can’t be helped now, and they reach their destination within twenty minutes regardless, stopping only to maneuver around Watch patrols who are all looking for them now. The loudspeakers started declaring them both traitors the instant they stepped outside. Corvo doubts they’ll stop.

 

“Citizens of Dunwall. In addition to the prior announcement, the Royal Protector, Corvo Attano, and his accomplice the Royal Arcanist, are now considered to be fugitives and traitors to the Empire. Anybody found harbouring either of these persons will be fined and arrested immediately.”

 

_ Citizens of Dunwall. Corvo Attano, responsible for the murder of our fair Empress and the disappearance of her daughter Emily, has escaped from Coldridge Prison. Several loyal officers of the state are dead by his hands- _

 

“That’s not where we’re going, is it,” the Outsider says to him. They’re standing in the shadow of the Boyle Mansion, the massive red-brick monolith that looks exactly as it did fifteen years ago - Esma has spared no expense to make sure of that - and Corvo shakes his head. It’s the apartment next door they’re going to, a nondescript building with a window that overlooks the Boyle’s former guard post.

 

There were weepers in here a long time ago. They can both smell it when he breaks the lock on the outside. One of the many post-plague sweeps of the district will have removed the corpses, but the stench of disease has lingered here, seeping into the walls and the tiling even though someone has paid to have everything re-papered, cleaned.

 

Corvo knows the history of this building quite well. He got into the Mansion through that window upstairs, kept an eye on the place afterwards. It was sold and should’ve been demolished when a renovation failed to make it attractive to tenants; he assigned the matter to one of his agents and had the demolishment approval fall through. It’s always useful to have somewhere like this, for situations like this. He supposes in a way he’s been planning for a coup someday - planning for a day when he’d have to go on the run again, although not consciously.

 

Not with the idea of having other people with him in mind, either. The supply cache in the room on the top floor that he recovers after laying Alexi down on a mattress and double-locking and bolting the door is small. Intended for his use only. He pulls out a full vial of elixir and an empty one and sits down on the hard floorboards to pour out half in each.

 

The Outsider slumps onto the floor, too, against the window that looks out over the Estate District, where the clocktower stands out like a thick black stripe against the greying sky. “I didn’t expect this,” he says.

 

Corvo sections off the red liquid elixir carefully. “What did you think was about to happen?” He holds the two vials up to the light, makes sure they’re even and hands one to the Outsider. “Drink this. Are you going to tell me who Delilah is?”

 

“I Marked her in 1831,” the Outsider says, peering at the elixir before swallowing it all down in a single gulp. “But she was already on her way to becoming a witch. She may be the most powerful magic user in all the Isles right now.” The vial drops from his hand to the floor. Corvo can see pale bone showing at the top of his little finger. “She’s supposed to be trapped in the Void. Dead, for all intents and purposes.”

 

“Supposed to be?”

 

“You didn’t think Daud sat around in his headquarters and waited for you to arrive to duel him to the death, did you? He was working on Delilah those six months.” The Outsider sighs. “At my request. She was getting too close to the completion of her plan.”

 

“And what was her plan?” Alexi is still completely out. He has to pry open her lips with his fingers to get the elixir down her throat, checking her pulse while he’s there. It has regained some vague semblance of stability, but isn’t strong enough to quell his worries. She needs a poultice over her wound and something to make sure it doesn’t fester.

 

“The throne. Through another, more insidious method.”

 

“Which was what?”

 

Silence. Corvo turns and sits beside the mattress. “This isn’t a good time for you to be keeping secrets from me,” he warns, though he knows the Outsider probably doesn’t care. Even seven years ago, on the verge of death and having to ask the help of Corvo and a number of other Marked, he kept details to himself, not revealing his plan until the last moment possible. Gods who see glimpses of all time and space don’t feel the need to share information with mere humans. Even the ones they have less than god-like feelings for.

 

“It doesn’t matter,” the Outsider says. “All you need to know is that Delilah has ambitions. She wants the throne, she wants Dunwall, she wants the rest of the Isles, and she has the Duke twisted around her little finger.” His own mangled finger twitches at that. “I saw them when they were young, but I never thought she would be able to use him like this. I thought Daud was the end of her. It seems I underestimated - something.”

 

He hates hearing Daud’s name again. Hates knowing that this is  _ his  _ mess, somehow, because a man who left Dunwall a decade and a half ago will never be done causing problems for Corvo and his family. “We can’t stay here,” he decides. “For a couple of days, yes, then we have to move. This district is a bad place to be.”

 

The Outsider offers no response. His mouth is set from pain and stress that Corvo doesn’t know if he’s ever felt before in this magnitude.

 

“I’ll go out when it’s darker. The Blayne Clinic is west; they’ll have herb and elixir stocks to help Alexi and you. It’s a shame we can’t ask one of the doctors for help, but I’m not ready to trust anybody after the way we got turned on at the tower.”

 

“They’ll recognise you.”

 

Corvo smiles grimly. “I’ll have to improvise another mask,” he says. “Black cloth up to the eyes will do. You can’t go out while I’m gone, obviously, or at all. Not a lot of people outside the tower know who you are-”

 

“Ramsey and Delilah both saw my eyes,” the Outsider points out. “Look for a heretic with a gaze as dark as the Outsider’s. My lack of a common name won’t even stumble them with a description like that circulating.”

 

He’d almost forgotten that the Royal Arcanist has no actual name in the public eye, not that he’s in it much. Emily drew up the appointment papers herself and thus was afforded a lot of leeway in keeping her new advisor anonymous - they both suggested names to him, simple things that would help smooth the gaps in his new identity, help build the illusion that he hadn’t materialised out of thin air, but he adamantly refused. Corvo would never have been able to call him anything other than the Outsider, anyway.

 

A hiss draws his attention. The Outsider is examining his finger, wincing as he probes the sliced-off end with his other hand. “Hey,” Corvo says, alarmed. “What are you - here, let me find something to tie that off with.”

 

He rummages through the supply cache again and finds a thin roll of white cloth, thick enough to serve as a bandage, and hacks off a length with his sword. A piece of twine fished out of the bottom of the cabinet keeps it in place, wound around the Outsider’s outstretched finger with a delicate touch. The small noises of pain he keeps making are distressing to Corvo; the worst - physically speaking, barring the time he was nearly washed into oblivion by the Void - he’s ever seen the Outsider dealing with is a papercut.

 

It reminds him of how safe they’ve been these past years. How secure. Assassins have come and gone and had their throats slit in back alleys after he tracked them down, and Emily has not yet had to kill again. The Outsider has not had to handle a weapon once in seriousness since he became human. Two days warning, however vague, and there was nothing any of them could do.

 

Corvo finishes bandaging up the Outsider’s finger and sighs. “As soon as it’s dark, I’ll go out,” he repeats himself. “For more supplies. We’ll need to change that frequently.”

 

The Outsider pokes the bandages again. “She’ll be dangerous with it,” he murmurs. “My finger. There are still traces of Void in this body.” Another small hiss as he touches the very edge of his wound. “Even more dangerous, that is. I sincerely hope Emily made it to that ship.”

 

“She made it,” Corvo says, with feeling, because he won’t and can’t believe anything else.

 

~

 

Alexi stirs at sunset, her eyes opening as the last rays of light streak dirty gold across Dunwall’s skyline. They are glassy, narrowed with agony, but she makes an effort to sit herself up a little further before Corvo rushes over to stop her. “Lord Corvo… Where are we?”

 

“Somewhere safe.” He has another half vial of elixir for her. She gulps it down and clasps her hands to her stomach, eyelids fluttering again. “For now, at least.”

 

“The Empress…?”

 

“I don’t know,” he has to tell her. “Emily went for the docks. With any luck, she’ll be on her way to Serkonos by now. Where the Crown Killer murders started, and where the Duke was probably planning his coup. You did well, Alexi.” Not ‘Captain Mayhew’, not like this in a cramped apartment with his jacket tied around the almost-lethal stab wound in her abdomen.

 

She blinks, nods slowly and surveys the apartment with her limited vision, eyes finally lighting on the Outsider sitting cross-legged beneath the window. “Is that… the Royal Arcanist?”

 

The Outsider waves at her with his bandaged hand.

 

“I’m going to get more supplies from the clinic down the street. The two of you will be alright here until I get back.” Corvo checks Alexi’s heartbeat again; it’s fast becoming a habit. She’s the same age as Emily, one of Emily’s closest friends, and he finds it hard not to project his intense worry for his daughter into his movements. “Ou- Lock the door and bolt it when I go, understood?”

 

He doesn’t miss the way Alexi stiffens minutely at the news that she’s about to be alone in an unfamiliar place with the Outsider - he isn’t quite sure he blames her, with the way tower rumour often paints the man - the god. And of course the Outsider does nothing to dispel any of it, spending his days reading and writing and pacing in his chambers, asking for odd materials from the kitchens, tracking oil on the tower floors.

 

She’ll have to deal with it. He retrieves the piece of navy-blue cloth he scavenged from the Outsider’s pockets and knots it firmly around his face, glancing regretfully at his jacket lying over Alexi. They replaced his makeshift bandage with real ones while they waited for sunset, but the jacket is still soaked in blood. Not ideal to wear when you’re looking to go unnoticed.

 

“Watch her,” he says to the Outsider, who motions him over. “What?”

 

The Outsider looks up at him with his impenetrable black eyes through long, equally black lashes, and says solemnly, “Delilah could already have witches spreading through the streets of this city like bad weeds. Her coven was large before Daud brought her down, and we don’t yet know how long she’s been free of the Void.” He hesitates, reaches up to brush his fingers across Corvo’s Marked hand silently. “Good luck.”

 

~

 

The moon is a pale spectre in the sky above Corvo outside; the clocktower looms in the distance, its white face a luminous mirror image to the less earthly body. By the time he gets back, they may be the only light he has to see by in the growing darkness - power to the street lights of the Estate District has been shut off, he notes with interest. The carriage lines have likely been similarly cut off. Shroud the city in darkness, remove fast transport between districts for richer citizens, demoralise the people. It’s been less than a day since Delilah seized the throne and she is already making sure that Dunwall knows her, fears her.

 

Corvo’s new mask is unfamiliar. The fabric is too soft and yielding, unlike the moulded inner surface of the mask Piero made for him fifteen years ago, at the whim of the Outsider. He touches it while he sneaks from shadow to shadow, adjusting it til it feels almost right. At least he has his sword with him.

 

He does not intend to kill anyone tonight, though, if he can help it. A block west, he swings up onto the rooftops via a stack of crates and patters over the heads of a Watch patrol, all with swords drawn. One of them is smoothing a Wanted poster onto a wall -  _ The Crown Killer - known traitor to the Empire _ . The picture is an artist’s rendition of Emily, and Corvo has to rein in his blade hand.

 

Further westward he turns instead, to the Blayne Clinic, a squat brown-brick building on the border of the Market and Estate Districts only because that was where it was cheapest to construct it. Patients from the former district tend to be turned away at the front door, although Corvo has confirmed rumours from his agents that one of the doctors there will sometimes attend to more serious cases through the back door.

 

It is the back door to which he heads now, dropping from the roof in a Market-side alleyway that leads directly to it. An odd smell pervades the brick corridor - blood and sickness, like many places in Dunwall, but also soap, ginger, ash, the scent of the thin leather gloves that some doctors wear to keep their hands clean, like the old Dead Counters used to. Corvo tests the back door and finds it locked. Unfortunate.

 

He unfolds his sword and taps gently on the glass of the alley-facing window next to the door. It doesn’t sound reinforced, so he stabs harder, and the window shatters, allowing him entrance to the clinic’s backroom as long as he clambers in delicately, touching the edge of the glass only with the hand covered by the black cloth strips that hide his Mark from view. Inside, his boots crunch for a few steps on glass before he is on the tile floor of the backroom.

 

The smell of ginger and soap is much stronger in here. Mostly this room looks to be used by the clinic’s non-medical staff, with cleaning implements occupying a shelf that takes up an entire wall of the small floorspace. Desks covered in papers and more shelves piled high with linens, clean and dirty towels make up the rest of the furniture. High overhead, an oil lamp burns.

 

Corvo frowns. The clinic’s back door was locked. It’s late evening now, after the time this place shuts its doors, and he knows it isn’t the type of clinic that has overnight beds for patients requiring care longer and more intensive than can be covered in an hour’s consultation. Why is there a light on?

 

Beyond the backroom, an unlit corridor leads past sliding doors to what Corvo assumes are offices, consulting rooms perhaps. The only handled door is on his immediate left when he exits - a look through the keyhole confirms it to be his destination, the storeroom, but this door too is locked. He conducts a brief search of the office opposite but comes up with nothing besides a roll of bandages in an unlocked desk drawer, which he stashes in his pocket. Perhaps the key is at the clinic entrance. He isn’t eager to break down this door, too.

 

Reception is a little more open than the rest of the rooms in the clinic, but still maintains the bland, sterile aesthetic Corvo has noted the rich like from their medical facilities, with eggshell blue walls that read grey in the dim lighting and furniture a uniform honey-blond wood colour. A desk faces the front entrance, and he is just about to investigate it when he hears the rustling of paper.

 

Somebody is there. Corvo flattens himself against the wall of the corridor and peers around it to see a woman with dyed-red hair and an exceptionally lined forehead sifting through documents at the front desk. She sighs, very loudly.

 

Almost at the same moment, there is a knock at the front door of the clinic.

 

“We’re closed,” the woman calls, reflexively as if she’s turned away patients this long after closing hours a hundred times. The knock comes again. “Oh, for fuck’s sake - we’re  _ closed _ , can’t you see the sign? You won’t get any answer at the back door, either, so you better not go round there.”

 

“Open this door, Coomb,” says another woman’s voice from outside. The red-head stiffens, blows air out through her nose in disgust.

 

“Ryers? Is that you?”

 

She gets up from her chair, key in hand, unlocks and opens the front door, and Corvo is just about able to make out the features of the clinic’s evening visitor from the single lamp on in the main room. It’s a familiar face. “Doctor Ryers to you,” the woman at the door says.

 

“Doctor? Don’t make me laugh. You don’t have any kind of real degree.”

 

Millie Ryers pushes past the woman at reception, clearly heading towards the corridor in which Corvo is concealing himself. He slips back into the shadows and ducks into one of the consulting rooms at the end of the hall, keeping the sliding door steadily shut with his hand. Ryers. Sokolov’s old research assistant before he set off for Serkonos, now assistant to the Royal Physician.

 

He hears the sound of two sets of footsteps coming down the hall, stopping before the locked door that leads to the storeroom. “It’s that or Royal Physician,” Ryers says, tone harsh but with a barely hidden note of smugness. “I’m nobody’s assistant anymore, Coomb.”

 

“What? What happened to Doctor Toksvig?” Coomb, whoever she is, is taken aback, and so is Corvo. “What are you here for, anyway? I’m sure Dunwall Tower is better stocked in herbs than we are.”

 

“The Empress needs fresher materials than the stuff stored in the tower basement. Sokolov may have been a philandering disgrace, but at least he knew how to keep things fresh. The mould and the damp - it’s disgusting.” They’re both in the storeroom now, from the sound of their voices. “Dried algae, echinacea and wort, if you have any.”

 

Coomb says, “We do, but-”

 

“Then I’ll take it all. I’ll be back in the morning and I expect it all packed and ready.”

 

“Wait a minute, Ryers-”

 

“I’m the Royal Physician,” Ryers says icily. Corvo can imagine her craggy face crammed into an ugly scowl; he vaguely remembers it from the few times they met whilst Sokolov was also in the same room. She’d never been able to hide her dislike of the old man - not that Ryers, who must be forty or so, was so much younger that she could get away with calling him that. “Appointed by the Empress just a few hours ago, and vested with her authority.”

 

He slides open the consulting room door slightly; the storeroom is wide open, and the silhouettes of Ryers and Coomb are visible on the opposing wall, yet another lamp switched on above them. Coomb has her hands on her hips. “That’ll be the woman who waltzed into the tower this morning and started telling the whole city she’s the old Emperor’s daughter?” she says. “Who declared young Emily Kaldwin a traitor to the Empire? Jessamine’s daughter who’s ruled us well for fifteen years? I thought you were a lot of things, Ryers, but I never thought you were a turncoat. What  _ did  _ happen to Sandra, hmm?”

 

“She’s dead,” Ryers says, and then the silhouette on the storeroom wall has a flick-knife in its hand and is drawing it across Coomb’s shadowy figure quicker than Corvo ever thought she could move. “And I’ve taken what’s mine,” she continues as the other silhouette slumps to the ground silently. “Three years working for Sokolov. Eight for her. It should’ve been my position and now it is. Thanks to Delilah, first of her Void-cursed name.”

 

The sounds of her rummaging through the storeroom, opening crates and checking on the materials within, reach Corvo’s ears. He weighs his options: he could, probably should, kill Ryers right now. On the other hand, she might have information about Delilah, but he doesn’t feel able to conduct a proper interrogation here, and the possibility of taking her back to the apartment seems dangerous. His hand tightens around his sword.

 

There are footsteps again. Corvo closes the sliding door and presses himself back against the wall, listening to Ryers make the decision for him by walking off down the corridor. He doesn’t move until he hears the front door close again.

 

She left the storeroom unlocked. Coomb’s corpse lies against a shelf, throat cut with so much force that her head is half-toppled to the side. A useless waste - years of resentment thrust into one violent strike against someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There isn’t much he can do for her now, besides avoid stepping in the blood pooling from her body, which he does.

 

Ryers didn’t take much, if anything, with her when she left, and Corvo is quickly able to locate a pouchful of elixir, only half of which looks to be diluted with water or whiskey or something less than medicinal. A piece of paper he finds on the shelves between two boxes of poultice ingredients for different wounds contains application and mixing ingredients; he sticks it in his pocket and thanks whatever still lurks in the dark corners of the Void for his luck. He gathers up some other herbs whose names he remembers as being good for pain relief and healing as well before leaving the storeroom, cloth sack hoisted over his shoulder.

  
He doesn’t lock the door behind him, because the key is still clutched in Coomb’s outstretched hand, her own blood caking under her nails. He makes straight for the smashed back clinic window and slips out into the night.


	3. chapter two: 20th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i reference a bunch of content from corroded man and wyrmwood deceit in this chapter, but i've tried to contextualise it so that it's understandable to people who haven't read them? i hope i managed that anyway :o
> 
> the fancy glasses from near the end of the chapter Exist, somewhere, and you can see a picture of them [here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyVwUZVVQAAbTPV.jpg)

Limbo.

 

His first thought when he wakes up on the second day they’ve spent holed up in this tiny apartment is that that is where he is - a kind of purgatory in-between, stuck unable to go out and _do_ something to help his city. Out of the window, Corvo can observe the changes sweeping the Estate District: more City Watch, more City Watch corpses, here and there a black briar digging up the pavement. The loudspeakers make it hard to sleep at night.

 

But his sword must stay fastened at his belt, because he has a still very injured woman and a less injured but pain-wracked man to look after. Alexi has drifted in and out of consciousness, waking to get updates on their situation and down more elixir. The Outsider has mostly sat staring at the wall and offering bleak comments in reply to Corvo’s questions about Delilah when he changes the bandages on his finger.

 

They can’t stay here much longer, he decides, folding up the blanket he found downstairs and washed by hand in a water fountain a block away in the middle of the night. He needs to reconnect with his key allies in the city, with his agents and any tower staff who got out, and with Yul Khulan. The High Overseer would be the top priority, in fact, if his offices weren’t on the other side of the river.

 

He broaches the subject to his companions over a breakfast eaten out of cans; Alexi, who has just had the poultice on her stab wound changed, says, “I think - another short rest, and I might be able to walk, with some support. White Cliff Square isn’t too far from here, is it? And there’s a dock nearby.”

 

“I’m not sure, Alexi. You’re stable enough, but I’m worried about the way you’re healing. You should’ve both been taken to see a doctor straight away. You still need stitches-”

 

“And there’ll be a medic at the High Overseer’s Office who can do them,” Alexi points out. “They always keep someone on hand ever since the plague days just in case someone tries to assassinate the High Overseer, again, and they need emergency medical attention. We should try for the Abbey dock.”

 

The Outsider says, “I agree. While I may not have any desire to darken the Abbey’s doors, it would be a good place to regroup. I have business on the other side of the river that may help us if I’m able to conduct it.”

 

Two pairs of white-sclera-ed eyes meet his impossibly dark ones - Alexi seems to have gotten over her initial fright at seeing them uncovered by his spectacles, lost during their flight from the tower - in surprise. “What... business do you have over there?” Corvo asks. “I don’t know how freely we’ll be able to move once we reach the High Overseer’s offices.”

 

“Which is why we should concentrate on getting there before I explain,” the Outsider replies. Typically evasive.

 

He looks between the two of them, his current charges as Royal Protector. “Alexi. If you’re sure that your condition is improved enough in a few hours, then we’ll go. I’ll scout ahead first and make sure there’s a boat we can use. Pack up as much of the supplies as you can carry,” he adds, which isn’t really necessary. Two days in this tiny safehouse have exhausted most of the original one-person cache.

 

Nonetheless, the Outsider is piling empty elixir vials into his leather pouch when Corvo slips out to scout the dock. What he’ll need them for, Corvo has no idea. He rarely questions the Outsider on his odd collections nowadays, not since he spent a number of weeks collecting tears and sweat and blood for him on his own time.

 

White Cliff Square, home of the old Abbey of the Everyman, is further than either the Blayne Clinic or the house through which their small party descended from the carriage line; fortunately Corvo is once again afforded the relative safety of a path across the rooftops to his destination. He leaps above cobblestones that are already growing dirtier, rich civilians who are already growing more fearful, and notes a lack of City Watch patrols today. There is a chill in the air that does not match the usual sea breeze.

 

The Abbey rises up in its urban clearing ahead of him after a few minutes of carefully timed jumps, and he turns south towards the tiny dock that accommodates only a vessel or two at once. There is a boat at the dock, luckily enough - small, barely enough to get them all across the Wrenhaven, but if Alexi can walk by mid-afternoon, they might as well chance it. He wants to speak to Khulan. The apartment has grown far too small for him too, which is mildly embarrassing to admit. After years away from his original chambers and even more years from the Hound Pits’ attic, he has grown used to his spacious rooms in the centre of the tower, used to seeing Serkonos hanging on his wall when he wakes up, and some mornings, being able to roll over and tuck his chin into the crook of the Outsider’s neck.

 

He hasn’t forgotten the dirt, though. Blood and sewer-stink and mud are things which he will always be used to, in some form or another.

 

With Blink, he could have used the streetlights along the road in front of the Boyle Mansion to jump the wall and clamber safely unseen through the apartment’s top window. Instead, he has to leave the rooftops and enter through the ground level door, checking for roaming eyes. He set traps up and down the stairs the night they arrived here, but he would have felt safer had he been able to summon a swarm of hungry rats at the first sign of intruders.

 

The Outsider’s dark eyes turning to him when he unlocks the apartment door reminds him of the _itch_ \- it’s stronger now, the vague scratchiness that ripples across his hand when he thinks about what he used to be able to do, like a phantom fifth limb that could materialise him somewhere else or throw men across the room. He’s stronger and faster than he would be if he hadn’t ever been Marked, and yet he misses having the rest of those powers. If he’d still had them, would he have been able to save Emily?

 

“There’s a boat,” he informs the Outsider and Alexi, who is reclining on the mattress again, nibbling at a hunk of nearly black bread. “We’ll go in a couple of hours.”

 

“If it’s there, we should go now,” Alexi says. She pushes up with her hands into a sitting position, wincing, then tries to go further. She is on her knees when Corvo takes her arm to steady her, telling her, “You shouldn’t push yourself. I don’t want you hurt anymore than you already are-”

 

Alexi clenches her fist. “I’m _good_ ,” she says, and puts one foot on the ground, then the other until she is standing, mostly steadily. “Someone just needs to - have an arm around me, that’s all. We shouldn’t delay, Lord Corvo.”

 

“It’s just Corvo.”

 

“L- Corvo.” She reminds him once more of his daughter, absolute resolution in her gaze and the set of her jaw. “As the Royal Arcanist has mentioned more than once, Delilah is a witch, and a very powerful one. We should ensure that the High Overseer made a safe escape from the tower, like we did, and see if he has ideas on how to counter her magic. Music boxes, for example. It’s my recommendation as a Captain of the City Watch that this be our priority, so if I can stand-” She raises her arms away from him. Her legs tremble, but she does not stumble. “We’re going.”

 

Corvo closes his eyes. “Alright,” he says after a moment’s deliberation. “Is everything packed?”

 

“It is.”

 

He doesn’t say more, like _you should both stay close to me_ or _keep quiet, no matter what happens_ because the both of them already know that. They are already learning what it means to be on the run, to be hunted in your own city. He pretends not hear the Outsider murmuring, “Spoken well for a woman who might still die from her wounds,” as they lock the door of the apartment for perhaps the last time.

 

~

 

Alexi is fine the whole way to the dock. Her legs are steady, and no whimper of pain escapes her lips to alert the people they pass or quietly avoid that she is injured. Corvo doesn’t know if it’s a sign that she really is healing, or just the power of an extraordinary willpower - he suspects the latter. He has his arm under hers as they walk, his head down. The Outsider behind them looks steadfastly at the ground, too, to hide his eyes.

 

It seems too easy when they reach the small skiff, waiting invitingly for them, but Corvo detects no traps on or near it. He lowers Alexi gently down and takes the Outsider’s hand to help him in before settling himself at the controls. None of them speak, eyes searching the horizon for signs of danger.

 

There isn’t any that they can see - but as the boat inches out onto the Wrenhaven, they all begin to see less and less. A wave of fog is sweeping across the river. It isn’t thick and obscuringly grey like the natural fog that often cloaks the Wrenhaven in the colder months; this fog settles over the water like a haze at the edges of their eyelids, fuzzing their vision. It almost reminds Corvo of the sickly green of his old ability to possess other beings. He has to squint to see forward and backward.

 

The Outsider seems least affected by the fog. He directs the skiff with unswerving hands, like his vision can penetrate it, and yet Corvo sees him shaking a minute or two after they cast off, shuddering violently and then resuming his usual statuesque posture.

 

The third member of their party notices, too. “Do you get sea-sick?” she asks the Outsider. “You’re a bit green around the gills. I used to get that way when I first joined the Watch and we had to take tours on river patrol.”

 

“I’m not sea-sick,” the Outsider says, almost indignantly. “I have a great affinity for the ocean and its creatures,” and isn’t that an understatement. Corvo has strong memories both of the Void and its eerily floating whale and the time the Outsider took off on a whaling ship for three months, returned to Dunwall Tower with a suitcase full of whalebone and a fervent request from the captain that he never darken the hull of their ship ever again. Something about whales gathering around the ship, singing their songs at deafening volume until blood dripped from the ears of every crewmember while the Outsider looked on with a smile.

 

“It’s the fog,” he adds, folding his arms and huddling close into his own coat. “Delilah’s doing. It won’t be safe to travel across this part of the river much longer. You were right, Captain Mayhew. It is fortunate that we left today.”

 

The vague green tint to the world dissipates on approach to the other bank of the Wrenhaven, closing in on the backyard dock of the Office of the High Overseer and Corvo is immensely grateful to be reminded that a freight-sized elevator has been installed up from the dock to the offices’ backyard - he had had a brief moment of worry upon remembering that he met Samuel here fifteen years ago by leaping off a roof and sliding down a chain, not something that would be practical in reverse with Alexi’s condition.

 

He stops the skiff beside the dock and helps the other two out again. As Alexi gets her feet on solid ground, a mechanical grunt sounds from behind, and Corvo turns to see the freight elevator descending from the top of the bank with two gold-masked and armed Overseers inside it. He motions to the Outsider, who pivots to stare out across the river.

 

One of the Overseers draws his pistol the moment the elevator grinds to a stop, and the other barks, “Identify yourselves! What is your purpose in docking on Abbey property? This area is closed to anyone not an Overseer.”

 

“I’m the Royal Protector,” Corvo says, standing up straight and arranging his hands so that both Overseers can catch a glimpse of the Imperial signet ring on his left, silver on black. “I need to see High Overseer Khulan as soon as possible, if he’s here, and I’m sure he’ll want to see me.”

 

The pistol-wielding Overseer does not drop his gun. “Royal Protector,” the second says suspiciously. “Announcements have been made by the City Watch and the new Empress that you are a traitor to the state and that you are to be handed over to Dunwall Tower as soon as you’re sighted.” He peers past Corvo. “Am I to assume that you have the Royal Arcanist with you?”

 

“And Captain Alexi Mayhew of the City Watch, who is in need of urgent medical attention.” Alexi stands beside him, pale and sweating from the exertion of the trip and standing unassisted, and she nods at his words. “Please. I know Yul Khulan can’t possibly be a supporter of the new Empress, or the Abbey at large for that matter. You can see for yourself the fog we just came through. It can’t possibly be a natural phenomenon.”

 

“Witchcraft on a grand scale,” the Outsider, still facing the river, says.

 

The pistol-wielding Overseer’s gun droops this time. “Witchcraft,” he murmurs.

 

“Alright,” his companion says. “You’ve made your point, Royal Protector. I cannot speak for the High Overseer, but I’m no supporter of this… Delilah. I’ll permit you entrance, you and Captain Mayhew. The Royal Arcanist may _not_ enter the main building.”

 

Corvo starts to protest, but the Outsider says, “That’s fine. I’ll stay out here and watch the boat. I don’t wish to be in the company of Overseers anymore than they wish to be in mine.”

 

“I also cannot promise that the High Overseer will be able to see you immediately,” the Overseer tells them, turning back to the elevator. He waves them forward; Corvo turns to farewell the Outsider with a brief touch on the shoulder and then offers Alexi his arm. She accepts gratefully, shuffling onto the elevator at a gait the Overseer notes, adding, “But I will see what can be done about the Captain’s injuries.”

 

“Thank you,” Alexi says.

 

They ascend quickly, the Outsider and the boat that got them here growing smaller until they are toy figures set against the grey-green expanse of the Wrenhaven below. Overseers mill around the backyard of the High Overseer’s Offices in great number, eyes following Corvo and Alexi and their escort under their masks. There are barracks here with cots and living space for the usual garrison of Overseers, but as they make their way into the cavernous main hall of the Offices and upstairs, Corvo sees many more men than he remembers from previous visits, and glimpses beds in rooms not meant for that purpose.

 

He asks one of the Overseers about it, and gets in response, “The High Overseer has been recalling brothers from districts all over the city since the new Empress’s coup. He fears it isn’t safe, especially since Captain Ramsey is now in control of the City Watch.”

 

“Ramsey?”

 

“He has a taste for siccing his men on Overseers,” their escort says contemptuously. “An idiot with a grudge against everyone who isn’t him. He was here this morning as an envoy with an invitation from Delilah, for High Overseer Khulan to meet with her at Dunwall Tower. As if the High Overseer would be foolish enough to go back to a place where he was almost killed just two days ago.”

 

“How _did_ the High Overseer escape the tower?” Alexi asks suddenly.

 

The Overseer glances at her. “You’ll have to ask him when he meets with you. Which could be some time.” They halt in front of the archives on the top floor, and the Overseer opens the doors to reveal rows of cots set up between bookshelves. “You’ll have to wait here until he’s ready. I will find a medic to attend to Captain Mayhew.”

 

Corvo thanks him, and the two Overseers disappear down the hallway, leaving him to help Alexi to a cot. She winces as she lies down. “Think my poultice needs changing.”

 

“I’ll tell the medic when they arrive, but I’m sure they’ll know more about it than we do.” Corvo pats her hands, clutched over her ribs. “You’ll be alright, Alexi. You’ve done very well getting here. When this is over, you’ll make a fine commander for the City Watch.”

 

She gasps out a laugh. “I’m not sure I’m ready for that, Corvo-”

 

“You’d do better than Ramsey.”

 

“True,” she admits, then says, “Will the Royal Arcanist be alright out on the docks? I suppose I should’ve expected them not to let him in. They really do hate the man.” She hesitates. “I’ll… concede I wasn’t very fond of him before now, either. He’s a very odd person. And his job description isn’t exactly what I’d call normal.”

 

“Well,” Corvo says cautiously. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s used to it by now.”

 

“He is a heretic, isn’t he?” She asks it very quietly, but the sound of the word still echoes faintly around the four walls of a building dedicated to the burning of such people. “His eyes - and he never calls himself anything but the Royal Arcanist, at least not to my ears. Do you know his name?”

 

 _Yes_. But he can’t tell her that the name of the black-eyed man who has been sleeping in the same room as her for the past two days is ‘the Outsider’, and he has no other name to give her, unfortunately. The Royal Arcanist’s appointment papers have a blank space for a given name, though not for lack of suggestions from him and Emily. “No, I don’t know his name.”

 

Alexi frowns, bites her lip. “But I thought you two were… Well, I - Emily told me certain things that implied to me - and you’re the person he’s always seemed to be closest to, so I…” She trails off.

 

“What did you think we were?” Corvo asks, perfectly aware of what Alexi is implying but unwilling to say it out loud.

 

“Well, lovers. I’m very sorry if I was mistaken, of course-”

 

And there it is. “We are,” he has to say, and he has to take in stride the curious look that sweeps over Alexi’s face at the confirmation. _What kind of man doesn’t know the first name of the person he regularly wakes up in bed with,_ she probably wants to ask, but won’t. The kind of man who takes an ex-god in the body of a dead man for a lover six months after he falls to earth, he might answer, were he inclined to air his most embarrassing dirty laundry in front of one of his daughter’s best friends. “It’s, um-”

 

“You really don’t have to tell me,” Alexi says quickly. “If you don’t know, or - he wants to keep it secret. I was just wondering.”

 

A very uncomfortable silence stretches between them, broken only by the distant noises of Overseers shuffling through the halls outside. The archive cots are currently unoccupied besides the one Alexi has taken - at least, the ones Corvo can see. There might easily be some half-conscious Overseer in the upper part of the room who has just heard him confessing to an intimate relationship with the Royal Arcanist, a man who was barely saved from the Abbey’s bonfires by the skin of his teeth and an Imperial pardon. He fervently hopes not.

 

Presently, the archive doors are thrown open again, and an Overseer with thin scratches dulling the gold of his mask announces, “Medic’s here. Where’s my patient?”

 

Another Overseer tailing him points to Alexi and then beckons to Corvo, who stays at the door long enough to watch the medic kneel and start to examine Alexi’s wound before he follows his new escort. He is being led, he realises after a moment, to the meeting room, directly overlooking the square outside, a room he has taken pains not to be in since the night he murdered Thaddeus Campbell and threw his body onto the concrete below. Khulan has always accommodated his requests to meet at the tower, or in his private office, but - desperate times.

 

Khulan is poring over a map of the city when they enter the room. His red tunic is muddied, stained, perhaps with blood in some places, and he doesn’t look like he’s eaten in two days let alone slept, let alone rested for more than a few minutes. Corvo eyes the other Overseers dotted around the room, some with music boxes. “Yul,” he says.

 

“Corvo?” Khulan seems startled to see him. “Corvo, my friend-” He breaks away from his study of the map to greet him with an oddly formal handshake. “By the Strictures, it’s good to see you’re alive.”

 

“You as well,” Corvo says.

 

“I don’t have the men in the city looking for me as a declared fugitive,” Khulan rejoins. He nods to Corvo’s original escort, who turns on his heel and leaves. On the door he closes behind him is one of the Wanted posters Corvo has seen several times already, with a likeness of his daughter on it. “You and the Royal Arcanist and the Empress. Emily, of course, not this usurper Delilah who used witchcraft to steal the throne from under your blades.” He shakes his head. “She has already invited me to parley. I have no doubt she wants me dead or brainwashed through some magic so that I endorse her as rightful Empress.”

 

“What’s the situation in the city, Yul? I’ve been in the Estate District, hiding from patrols with two wounded people. I haven’t been able to contact any of my agents.” His spies, really, and Khulan knows it.

 

The High Overseer shakes his head again. There are more maps on the walls of the meeting room, of districts throughout the city. Out the window, the square-cut front of the Office of the High Overseer is devoid of people. “It’s been two days, and Delilah has already driven the state of affairs to madness,” he says. “She has sent invitations to a number of nobility as she did to me, asking them to pledge loyalty to her, but has otherwise left things to Mortimer Ramsey to consolidate her military hold on the city, with the Duke’s men and those… machine things. The City Watch still patrols, but they are in shambles - those paid off by the Duke elevate themselves to higher positions and slaughter those still loyal to Lady Emily.”

 

“Destroying any chance we have of rallying them to fight back,” Corvo says, dismayed.

 

“I have been calling back as many Overseers as I can to regroup here and sealed off Holger Square to anyone who isn’t a member of our Order.” Khulan rubs his head, sighs. “Faithful may be trapped outside, it is true, but I cannot allow the possibility of a witch infiltrating our ranks. Women with painted skin have been sighted near the tower. Likely Delilah’s cohorts.”

 

“You made the right choice, Yul.” There is a knock at the door of the meeting room, and an Overseer detaches from his post to check on it. “Out of interest, how did you manage to get out of Dunwall Tower yourself? The mechanical soldiers killed nearly everyone else there besides the three of us, that I saw.”

 

The door is opened, and an exclamation of “Lord Corvo!” floats through from the young man standing outside. Corvo turns his attention to see a bedraggled but visibly unharmed and relieved Jameson Curnow outside, who Khulan gestures to and says, “I had help.”

 

“Lord Corvo,” Jameson says, striding forward and bowing at the waist. Muddied and stripped of his usual immaculate jacket, Corvo is oddly reminded of Callista when he found her locked in Emily’s tower the day she was kidnapped, again, although he knows that the two cousins are not blood-related. Were not blood-related, he corrects himself with a pang of heartache. “I was able to get to the High Overseer in the chaos and lead him to one of the tower’s secret passages to safety and - Outsider’s eyes, I’m glad you’re alive!”

 

Several Overseers direct dark glances at Jameson for his oath; he doesn’t seem to notice. “You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve had word of Lady Emily,” he continues, and Corvo stiffens. “She was sighted at the docks twenty minutes after the ruckus at the tower. Killed a few guards, dogs, kicked a man into the Wrenhaven. It’s probably why I was able to get the High Overseer away with less trouble than I expected.”

 

“Then - she made it.”

 

“She was last seen by a loyal member of the City Watch, diving into the river,” Khulan says. “Swimming for a ship that left the harbour not five minutes later.”

 

Relief floods Corvo’s body, so thick and heady he has trouble keeping himself together. “For Karnaca,” he says. “That’s where she’ll go. Emily can take care of the Crown Killer and the Duke and Delilah’s other pets, whoever they may be, and we can oust Delilah herself, here in Dunwall. I just need a single shot at her-”

 

Khulan’s heavy expression stops him short. “Yul? Is there something you haven’t told me?”

 

“The witch cannot be killed,” an Overseer near the window says disgustedly. He tenses back into silence at a glare from Khulan, who sighs. “Corvo, I know you won’t believe this until you’ve seen it with your own eyes, but I - Jameson and I - have seen it with ours.”

 

“What in the Void do you mean she _cannot_ be killed?” There’s a sinking feeling in his gut, the same one he got when he saw the Outsider in the hall that day. _The Void_ is right.

 

Jameson says, “A noblewoman stabbed Delilah from behind after you and Emily ran, while she was distracted. Dahlia Horace, or Tabitha Kean, I can’t recall the name, but the sword ran true. Straight through the heart.” His tongue pokes at the inside of his cheek, a tic he often has when delivering bad news. “And then Delilah pulled the sword out of her own body and killed her with it.”

 

Corvo stands silent, absorbing. “You’re certain,” he says finally.

 

“She was shot as well,” Khulan tells him. “As we left, I saw her picking the bullet from her arm. This Delilah is a witch of unimaginable power, and she has this city in a stranglehold.”

 

“Then we’ll have to find out why she’s immortal, and make sure she isn’t when the next blade runs through her heart.” His hand twitches over his folding blade, the blade that put down two sets of usurpers and is ready to feel the blood of another. “Actually - that reminds me, Yul. The Royal Arcanist said he has something to attend to on this side of the river, something which might help us. Perhaps that was what he meant.”

 

Nobody could possibly miss the way every Overseer in the room, including Khulan, react to the mention of the Royal Arcanist, with hands clenched over weapons and a general tightening in posture. “If you’d permit him passage through this building, we can leave through the opposite end of the street.”

 

“I don’t know why you continue to vouch for that man,” Khulan says, as he has more than once over the past seven years.

 

He was there the night Overseers arrested the pale-faced, nameless man that Corvo was visiting, whose black pits of eyes had been seen by a neighbour and whispered about in the Market District until those whispers reached the ears of the Abbey. Khulan was in the district, was heading home to bed when he came upon Corvo ordering his men to release the Outsider, and what followed was a long and disquieting argument that ended with a walk to Dunwall Tower and the Empress being dragged from bed to grant him her clemency so that she could yell at Corvo herself in peace.

 

 _I promise you, High Overseer, you can come back and arrest him yourself if I’m not satisfied._ Emily had big dark circles under her eyes and was furious, absolutely furious, to discover that he’d hidden the Outsider’s newly-mortal existence from her for two weeks - _you said you didn’t want to know!_ \- and he misses her terribly, but she is safe. He knows that now, and he knows that she will know what to do, what will have to be done to take back her throne - she hasn’t killed since she was eighteen, but she has been ready every day since then to do it again.

 

So has he, of course.

 

“I trust him,” he says. “And Emily trusts him.” Mostly. “That should be enough. He isn’t about to profane the Office of the High Overseer just by stepping into it.”

 

Khulan looks like he might be about to disagree, but does nothing more than sigh again and incline his head. “I suppose not. But if he does anything other than step into it, Corvo, then I cannot be responsible for the actions of my men.”

 

“I’ll tell him,” Corvo says dryly.

 

~

 

He remains in the meeting room talking with Khulan about minutiae of the new Empress’s occupation for ten minutes more. There isn’t a lot else to learn of consequence, especially after the revelation that Delilah is seemingly immortal, that she is more impervious to steel and lead and gunpowder than the walls of Dunwall Tower itself. Jameson mentions to him quietly that he has been trying to re-establish contact with Corvo’s network of agents in his absence, with only limited progress, and Corvo tells him to remain here as long as it’s practical and ensure the High Overseer’s continued safety. Khulan is a powerful rallying point in a city devoid of Emily, and a friend.

 

An Overseer bars him from going into the archives to check on Alexi, informing him that the medic cannot be disturbed for another few minutes, so he keeps walking, under the high ceilings and yellow-white walls with their air of emptiness. Voices ring loud in the Office of the High Overseer, so that sermons can be delivered without the aid of a microphone, and snippets of conversation from passing Overseers float over him.

 

It is colder outside than it was half an hour ago. Corvo folds his arms as he walks out into the backyard, wishing someone had offered him another coat. He covered his own with mud and tossed it before they reached the boat earlier in an attempt to disguise the stink of Alexi’s blood on it. The Outsider still has a clean coat, but anything that fits his thin frame is likely to choke the life out of Corvo’s wrists.

 

Speaking of the Outsider, which the two Overseers watching him are doing in tight-mouthed whispers, he is lying in the boat when Corvo takes his return trip down the elevator to fetch him. With his eyes shut, he looks the picture of an ice-cold corpse.

 

“He can’t hear you, you know,” Corvo says to the Overseers, leaning down and shoving the Outsider’s shoulder for good measure. They stare at him. “Fast asleep.”

 

The Outsider’s breath hitches, but he does not stir. His ability to fall asleep practically on command as a human grates on Corvo’s nerves immensely, especially since he is still fond of complaining that sleep is a pointless exercise that takes up time he could be using doing something else. He leans in again and says, “Hey,” into his ear.

 

“Hello,” the Outsider says, eyes snapping open.

 

“You said you had somewhere to go when we reached this side of the river.”

 

He sits up, sniffs, glances at the Overseers. “Wyrmwood Way,” he announces, which neither the Overseers or Corvo are very pleased to hear. “I imagine Captain Mayhew is still being cared for, so you and I can go alone. It won’t take more than a couple of hours. Have you spoken to the High Overseer?”

 

“I have, and there are things I need to discuss with you-”

 

“We can do it on the way there,” the Outsider says. He stands jerkily and steps off the boat, making his way past Corvo to the elevator and beckoning to him. “I assume I’m going to be allowed to pass through as long as I don’t break out into ritual in front of the Seven Strictures, then.”

 

Corvo doesn’t answer. He has to resist an irrational urge to shield the Outsider back across the yard, to hide him from their prying eyes and lips mouthing strictures; the Outsider himself keeps his gaze at the ground and his pace slow, lingering, as if he is taunting them by walking on hallowed ground. He speeds up once they get inside though, takes long strides past the golden plaques inscribed with words preaching hatred and fear against him until they have reached the front door and are outside in the cold again.

 

Yet more Overseers await them at the southern end of the street, unlocking a gate and ushering them past with a haste Corvo initially assumes is attributable to the Outsider’s presence - but beyond the gate and the first initial stretch of road ahead of them, there are gold-masked bodies, piled against building fronts in crude, unlit funeral pyres. Other bodies too, mainly City Watch, but the number of dead Overseers is largest. “Ramsey’s work,” he says aloud. “Why do you want to go to Wyrmwood Way again, exactly?”

 

“There are things I need to collect from there,” the Outsider says. His eyes are no longer on the ground, since the street around them is clear. “Delilah-”

 

“Did you know that she’s immortal?”

 

He stumbles. Not visibly, but Corvo can hear it in the sound of his footsteps, the drag of one boot against pavement as he nearly trips over his own feet in shock. “No. Did the High Overseer tell you that?”

 

“He said she was stabbed and shot both and came away without a scratch on her,” Corvo tells him. “That isn’t a usual effect of your Mark - not that she has it to use anymore.” He stretches out his own left hand. “It would be easier if I still had mine. I know Dunwall Tower like the back of my hand. Immortal or not, I could get to work in there.”

 

“You don’t know Delilah’s Dunwall Tower.” Wyrmwood Way is on the south-east edge of the city, that much Corvo remembers, but he has not been back there in some time. He allows the Outsider to take the lead. “If I know her - and I do, Corvo - she will already be setting traps for you. You see what she’s begun to do to this city in only a short time. I’m not even sure that the throne is her ultimate ambition.”

 

“What does _that_ mean?”

 

“It means,” the Outsider says. “That I have… suspicions. Delilah was broken out of the Void by someone powerful who knew precisely what they were doing, at a specific place and a specific time, and I need to know where they brought her from and how, which is why we are on our way to the Arcane District. You ask a lot of questions.”

 

Corvo shoots him a frown. “I wouldn’t need to if you didn’t clam up like a river krust whenever something - _odd_ happens.”

 

“It was simpler when I was gone before you could talk back to me,” the Outsider replies, and then his tone darkens. “This is personal for me, Corvo. I… created Delilah, when I Marked her all those years ago. I stoked the fires of her hatred for those who wronged her. I gave her the power to snuff out the lives of the people she wanted dead. I sent Daud after her as well, and now it’s all come back on me. On _us_.” He folds his arms as they walk. “We both got complacent living in that tower. Sleeping on silks, blind to the dangers coming our way. If only I-”

 

His hands are twitching, lacing together when Corvo looks over at him again. He doesn’t press him for the rest of his sentence. He knows what the Outsider wishes he was, what he has tried to become again twice. Not because he wants that power back, or because he misses the Void, but because of some frightening, yawning _need_ that he has told Corvo about in fragments, dribs and drabs, like a burning at the back of his eyelids because he can’t _see_ like he used to anymore.

 

Last year, after Zhukov, he went looking for the knife, the one that made him, and Corvo was terrified he’d find it.

 

The Outsider takes a hard left at the end of the street they find themselves on after ten minutes or so, a ten minutes eerily free of other people besides glimpses of children at windows and men locking their doors behind them. Red and brown brick are three, four storeys above them, crowding them in on both sides; he turns right into a slim alley that Corvo almost has to turn sideways to fit through, and then they are here. Wyrmwood Way.

 

There isn’t any signage proclaiming this street different from the others around it, but it is. Grimy glass and gaudily painted shopfronts alike hide bonecharm crafters, heretical alchemists, witches, the kinds of people Corvo has spent years avoiding because of the Mark on the back of his hand, and there are actually people here, though not many. A hunched woman with thick black hair smiles at Corvo as she exits a shop marked ‘DO NOT ENTER - CONDEMNED’ above the door; a bonecharm, ragged at the ends in a way that indicates corruption, hangs on a cord from her pants pocket.

 

He spies an object similar to the one the Outsider bought here pressed against a shop window a few doors down from the ‘condemned’ building, and thus it comes as little surprise when the Outsider swerves towards it, marching through the shop door as if he owns it. A man in his forties with black-rimmed spectacles grunts a greeting from the front desk; the Outsider waves back.

 

“I need the tincture,” he says to the man, presumably the shop-owner. “You know the one. And that item I was looking at a few days ago.”

 

The man adjusts his glasses. He doesn’t seem to blink, notes Corvo, who is hanging back awkwardly near the entrance. “ _That_ tincture? I heard there was a lot of bloody ruckus going on with the tower, but you’ve had me holding onto that for three years.” His voice is rough, but cultured, a hint of characteristic Academy stuffiness lingering on his vowels. An alchemist, then. “I’ll go in back. If you’re sure.”

 

“My associate will wait while you fetch it,” the Outsider says, and Corvo is not at all sure how he feels about being referred to as the Outsider’s ‘associate’. “I’ll be back shortly. From next door,” he amends at Corvo’s worried expression. “Nothing in here will bite.”

 

“Besides the krust spit,” the man at the desk says, leaning hairy forearms on it as the Outsider brushes past Corvo back onto the street. “And the rats, if you let them. You a friend of his? I didn’t think he had any.” One eye looks him up and down, quite independently of the other. The man still has not blinked once. “Ah. Besides the Royal Protector, or so he says. Would that be you?”

 

Corvo resorts, as often in the face of unfamiliarity, to silence.

 

“Well, you’re welcome to have a look around, whoever you are.” The man makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, then pushes off the desk and disappears into a back room to retrieve whatever the Outsider asked him to. Corvo, left alone, follows his suggestion and examines the wares on display in this small shop, such as they are. What look to be alchemical ingredients are grouped in glass containers on shelves that line the walls of the entire first floor; they are labelled individually with prices that sound ridiculously high when written next to their names. Processed hemlock extract, dried crackling, strained krust spit, shards of smashed and soaked whalebone are amongst the things for sale.

 

His attention wanders to a solitary rack that does not contain ingredients. Bonecharms and odd tools cluster on the top shelves instead, and half of the bottom two shelves have been removed to accommodate a stand for spectacles, including pairs nearly identical to the ones the Outsider usually wears in public. He’d always wondered where they came from. Probably it should’ve occurred to him sooner that they might come from an arcane shop - where else could one buy a pair of tinted glasses to hide their horrifying blackened eyes without being immediately arrested besides here?

 

There are other pairs, too. Corvo picks up round spectacles tinted a pretty sea-blue with gold metalwork across the bridge and top rims, turning them over and holding them over his eyes. To his surprise, they are perfectly clear to see through. “Bit ostentatious, though,” he murmurs.

 

“I like them,” the Outsider declares over his shoulder.

 

He almost - _almost_ \- drops the glasses. The Outsider used to be a formless Void god who could disappear and reappear at will and yet, he has never been better at getting the drop on Corvo than he is as a human. If he and Emily were inclined to co-operate in that fashion, he’s sure they could collectively drive him to a heart attack. “They might draw more attention than your eyes uncovered.”

 

The Outsider leans over and plucks the glasses from his fingers, and takes a pair of the tinted ones from the rack for good measure. “These, too,” he calls to the shopkeeper, who has returned from the back room while Corvo was perusing the shelves. On the front desk, there is now a fist-sized contraption that again resembles the object the Outsider brought back to the tower nearly five days ago. A bonecharm of the kind Corvo remembers carrying during the Rat Plague is housed in its centre, and actual small clock faces are embedded in its sides, while shards of glassy black rock lie facedown across the top of it.

 

Beside the contraption, the shopkeeper places a bottle of liquid, and says, “Five hundred for everything. It’s a discount, given I don’t guess you’re welcome in Dunwall Tower anymore. You’d think a woman like that would remember her friends, but she’s more likely to run us all out of business.”

 

“Friends?” Corvo asks, hackles rising at the mention of Delilah. “Do you know her?”

 

“Not her per se.” The Outsider pulls out his pouch and hands over the requisite coin without a fuss; the shopkeeper pockets it, peering at Corvo. “Breanna used to be in here all the time years ago, collecting ingredients, painting materials, always said they were for her mistress. Delilah Copperspoon. I don’t know where the Kaldwin came from that she’s attached to herself now. Maybe she did some digging in the family graveyard and found something that didn’t add up.”

 

Corvo says, “Or maybe she’s lying to try and give herself a legitimate claim to the throne she’s just usurped.”

 

The shopkeeper shrugs. “Maybe. Either way, she has what she wanted. Wonder if Breanna’s still with her.”

 

Purchases heaped in his arms, the Outsider blinks a farewell and the two of them make their way outside, where he stops Corvo and hands him the bonecharm-powered contraption so that he can put on his fresh pair of tinted glasses. The blue-and-gold ones go into his pocket, leaving him only with the tincture and another clear jar that Corvo guesses came from the shop next door. The tincture is the hideous reddish-pink of a slaughterhouse killing floor, blood and oil and shards of bone smushed together into a thoroughly unpleasant mixture, while the jar holds a more viscous substance that is pure jet black.

 

“What _is_ that?” he asks the Outsider.

 

“An alchemical concoction I commissioned.” He shakes the bottle; a scrap of something pale drifts through the liquid. “It will allow me to see for a short period. Into the Void. Depending on where I use it, it may help shed some light on how Delilah was brought back into the world and where she is drawing her current power from.”

 

“And… the other one?”

 

“Nail polish,” the Outsider says, whisking both jars away into his pouch with a satisfied smile. He takes the contraption back from Corvo. “And this is a timepiece. Not necessarily something we’ll need, but it was made by the same hand as the eddy detector, so I thought it best to keep it close.” He tries to fit it into his pouch, fails, and slots it neatly under his arm. “I have some ideas on where to use the tincture, if you’d care to hear them when we’re back at the Abbey. I’m sure Captain Mayhew will be patched up by now.”

 

They head north towards the other end of Wyrmwood Way, past the alley they entered through, and Corvo feels a slight chill when he recognises one of the stores on their right, an old red-brick building with boarded-up windows. The door has not been fixed since the day he kicked it in, leading a Watch patrol to search the premises and finding nothing more than dusty iron cages and a shredded painting frame. It was one of the last places Martha Cottings, the woman he thought to take on as an apprentice, was ever seen alive.

 

She still might be, of course, but she wasn’t the type of person to leave a job unfinished like that, to vanish from her entire life in the middle of an assignment. Far more likely a witch’s briar strangled the breath out of her or a Hatter landed a lucky blow, and he is reminded of the Outsider’s comments from a few days ago. Alexi nearly died even without becoming his next protégé; he is very thankful that he can append a ‘nearly’ to that sentence.

 

Thinking of Alexi leads him to another recollection - their conversation before he spoke with Khulan. “Ah,” he says.

 

The Outsider looks at him. “What?”

 

“Alexi asked me earlier about… us. Whether I knew your real name, whether we were-” He rolls his eyes to the sky. “Sharing a bed. I told her we are.”

 

“I see,” the Outsider says, inflection utterly neutral. “Do you care that she knows?”

 

“I… You don’t, I see.”

 

“Not particularly.” The Outsider pauses. “Although I have less of a reputation to be destroyed than you do, as father of the Empress and Royal Protector and Spymaster. Nobody would question my taste, at least.”

 

Corvo lets out a huff of a laugh, stifling it almost immediately at the sight of one of the piles of Overseer corpses coming into view up the street. They must be getting closer to the High Overseer’s Office already. “We have been more discreet than many - affairs at court usually are,” he says. _Love affairs_. He isn’t quite ready to attach that word to this relationship he and the Outsider have, this thing whittled out of old reverence and frustration and a sense of comfort, and this is not the time to dwell on it further with more masked bodies lying ahead, more than he remembers being there when they left.

 

He doesn’t have to tell the Outsider to quicken his pace. They match strides easily despite his height advantage, almost jogging towards the gate which has been torn open by something much stronger than an ordinary human, perhaps something with twin swords for arms.

 

The two Overseers who let them through the gate earlier are dead, Corvo sees immediately, crouching and reaching out an arm to hold the Outsider back from going further than the fence separating the main building from the street. More men are dead or near to it along the street, stabbed or shot or ripped apart or burned, somehow. The mechanical soldiers must be able to generate an electrical discharge like an Arc Pylon, and there are two of them in the centre of the square, directly below the windows of the meeting room.

 

Flanking the soldiers are a small group of men in the uniform of the Serkonan Grand Guard - the Duke’s men - all with drawn swords, led by one man dressed like an officer of the City Watch, who has just finished shouting something up to the windows. Khulan must still be up there. Corvo motions to the Outsider to stay where he is and creeps forward, trying to hear what the Watch officer is saying.

 

He’s quiet. He’s sure he is, but the mechanical soldier near him perks up, the backside of its wooden beak shining with light, and says in a calm, inhuman voice, “Preliminary detection state.”

 

As one, the five Grand Guard men turn their heads, and so does the City Watch officer, who is wearing a mask, an ugly stitched thing of lead-grey with red backing, like the face of a metal skeleton with no nose and two glassy, soulless eyes-

 

Corvo’s mask.


	4. chapter three: 20th-21st Day, Month of Earth, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty for all the comments last chapter !! i got some cute messages on tumblr too n i'm there (or on twitter) a lot if yall want to chat to me or kick my ass to motivate to write more :* this one is a little shorter than usual bc i just wanted to get it Done but last ch was extra long so

It’s an odd thing, seeing the face you wear over your own from the outside. Seeing the facsimile of a corpse that strikes terror into the hearts of people the city over, the second skin that you see in place of your real face sometimes in your dreams, on someone else, someone who wears it crudely. The straps don’t fit. The pale, gathering flesh of a double-chin juts beneath the end of the dark grey mask.

 

It must chafe. But then, so many things do on the man under the mask, as Corvo is quickly learning.

 

The men from the Grand Guard are standing back, ordered by their leader to let him have his fun, and the mechanical soldiers rise up on either side of the square, sentinels, perverse referees of wood and metal to a fight that should’ve been easy for him to win. He stood when they detected him, drew his sword - there wasn’t any use hiding from machines that can see from the backs of their heads, not in an open space like this - and Mortimer Ramsey laughed at him.

 

“A duel, then? I’m happy to oblige,  _ Corvo _ .” He’s never called him that before, always Royal Protector or Lord Attano and Corvo doesn’t know how he never realised the touch of sarcasm Ramsey added every time. He presses forward at an opening, towards Ramsey’s injured shoulder. It closes; the sound of metal-on-metal shrieks in his ears.

 

If he were to look up, Khulan is probably still watching from the windows. There are a few Overseers in the square, peering through the gaps in the main entrance, but they are acting only as spectators to the fight going on. Too afraid of the mechanical soldiers. There’s another opening, another hole in Ramsey’s defence. Corvo ignores it. He parries a thrust meant for his neck.

 

This is wrong. He’s fought Ramsey before and seen him fight with others. He crossed swords with him a few days ago and gave him the bandaged slice on his shoulder, but now he cannot break through the man’s defences. Their strength is almost evenly matched. 

 

“Surprised to see me wearing your mask?” Ramsey coos. “Delilah broke open your precious daughter’s saferoom and I found it in plain sight on top of that gun case. Cocky, aren’t you?” His Watch-issued sword nicks the sleeve of Corvo’s shirt. “The Royal Protector and the Masked Felon, one and the same. You fucking Serkonans are all alike. Criminals and whores skulking in the shadows.  _ Rats _ .”

 

A clank as their swords connect again. “No wonder the old Empress died. You invite rats into your house, they eat all your food, nibble at your furniture. Until it all comes crashing  _ down _ -”

 

Grunts from both of them. Ramsey’s injury doesn’t seem to be hampering him at all. “Delilah’s a breath of fresh air for this stinking city. Purge the interlopers and the thieves and leave the old blood standing tall, like my-” A sword stroke. “Fucking-” Corvo parries. “Family, who that little girl could’ve raised back up again if she’d had the sense to know any of what she’s doing. I could’ve been drinking in the Officer’s Club-”

 

“You sure like to run your mouth,” Corvo says. He sidesteps another swing and goes for the shoulder again, hitting it with the flat of his blade. Ramsey doesn’t even flinch. He shouldn’t be able to keep pace with someone with the vitality of a Marked. Delilah must’ve done something to him, empowered him, or-

 

“I’ll be the new Royal Protector,” he boasts. “And when Emily comes home looking for her father, I’ll be the one to kill her. And I’ll do it wearing your mask. How does that sound,  _ Corvo _ ?”

 

Ramsey steps back, and Corvo hears it. The rattling of bone under that Watch coat. Stolen from the safe in Corvo’s chambers or gifted by Delilah. Ramsey isn’t smart or stupid enough to have carved them out himself and kept them hidden for this day, which he has already said he’s been waiting for for a long time. He should’ve seen it.

 

“Am I tiring you out?” A flick of the wrist, flourishing the sword in a poorly executed mockery of one of his own moves.

 

Corvo says nothing. He eyes Ramsey’s posture, the folds of his clothes, the way he favours one side - the opposite side he should be favouring, with his injury - and waits for him to strike first, watching watery eyes blink underneath his mask. An idiotic trick, intended as a gloat or to demoralise, which Ramsey can’t do properly because he hasn’t learnt that the first trick to intimidation is to be  _ quiet _ . Emily knew that when she was ten years old.

 

The strike comes. Corvo swivels, dodges, and cuts through half of Ramsey’s coat, his sword barely grazing flesh but slicing clean through a cloth sash fastened under his lapel. The bonecharms making him a match for Corvo, making him faster, dampening the pain in his shoulder, clatter to the ground.

 

“What - you bastard-” Ramsey cuts off, groaning, slapping a hand to his wound. His jaw is grinding under the edges of the mask. Corvo flourishes his sword, properly, and steps towards him, but before he can finish him Ramsey is shouting, “Grand Guard, clockwork soldiers, protect me, you idiots!” and all hell breaks loose.

 

He hadn’t known the mechanical soldiers -  _ clockwork _ soldiers, which makes sense because every move they make is accompanied by an omnious ticking - could jump. He does now, when one leaps between him and the fast-scrambling away Ramsey, an upward thrust that almost seems to defy gravity. Whoever created these things must have a mind on par with Anton Sokolov’s to manage such a feat.

 

The clockwork goes for him with two swords; he parries, barely, and has to struggle back under the intense force behind it. He needs a second to regain his balance, but the clockwork does not give it to him. It is not human and has no such need and presses forward while Corvo is trying to regroup, see what the Grand Guard soldiers are doing. They have drawn their swords, but look to be leaving him to the clockwork to kill, and he catches a glimpse of an Overseer at the door drawing up his courage and running towards a Guard soldier, sabre out.

 

There is a yell. Corvo cannot see whether the Overseer has killed the soldier or vice versa from his position, but more armed Overseers are pouring from the doors. Good. With any luck, they can take care of the Grand Guard and then overwhelm the clockworks somehow with sheer numbers. He slashes at the thing’s arms and hits, knocking off some of its amber-coloured wooden outer covering and sees - a small white tank embedded in its arm, glowing white.

 

_ Whale oil _ . A surge of triumphant energy rushes through Corvo. Like the tallboys, years ago, but harder to get to. That’s their weak spot.

 

“Triggering electrostatic discharge,” the clockwork says mildly.

 

It hunches into itself, inner workings glowing an orange-red-blue and then Corvo barely has time to sprint out of range before a bubble of electrical current shoots out from the clockwork. It hits one of the Grand Guard soldiers, who shrieks and shudders and goes down.

 

Corvo is further back from the first clockwork now and can see the second, advancing on an Overseer. Two Grand Guard still remain plus Ramsey, surrounded by six or seven Overseers - a shockwave runs through the ground in front of him as the recovered clockwork plants itself in front of him. Before he can react, it knocks his sword from his grasp with a whirlwind strike of all four sharp arms, its entire body leaning towards him.

 

He stumbles back and falls, right on top of the corpse of one of the Overseers the thing previously slaughtered. If he only had Blink, a windblast, something to push it back - but he can’t keep thinking like that anymore. His powers are gone. He has survived seven years without them, and he will not die to an oversized child’s toy created by some madman back in his homeland.

 

His hand fumbles for the pistol all armed Overseers usually wear strapped to their waists and finds it, pulls it out of its holster. The clockwork booms, “Combat protocol… nine.”

 

Corvo aims and fires, and the pistol clicks on empty.

 

For a second, he thinks he might be about to die. The clockwork keeps on going, raises its metal arms to bring them down on him, and then a small ball lands in front of it from somewhere in the direction of the street and rolls between its gangly wooden legs. It looks down at the sparking thing.

 

He has barely enough time to roll away himself, curl into a foetal position around the useless lump of the pistol and shield himself from the grenade’s explosion. Shrapnel hits the tiny oil tank in the clockwork’s arm; it goes up, too, and then another tank in its other arm, one on each arm on the opposite side, a larger one in the centre of its frame. It hunches over like earlier as the chain reaction takes out its power supplies.

 

The clockwork blows apart in a rain of gears and burnt wood and angry mechanical buzzing noises, and Corvo looks up to see the Outsider far across the courtyard, black eyes wide, with his hand still open from his over-handed throw.

 

One down.

 

Corvo uncurls and pushes up, getting to his feet and tossing the pistol away. The other clockwork is over near the door, still encircled by Overseers. They are shooting at it with their own loaded pistols. Amber wood panels crack and fall away with almost every gunshot to reveal the oil tanks underneath - they must’ve seen what he did. One Overseer lets out a shout and fires two bullets behind the clockwork, directly into the tank on its back, and then the second clockwork explodes too and there is only one Grand Guard left, one and Ramsey.

 

He recovers his sword from the ground and steps over the clockwork parts, towards the huddle. Ramsey is clutching his shoulder and cursing at the Overseers; his single remaining soldier has cast down his weapon and has his hands over his head with a grim expression. A sensible man, Corvo thinks, and he says as much when he reaches them.

 

“Take him to the High Overseer,” he tells the Overseers. “He and Curnow can question him.”

 

One of the Overseers looks up to the meeting room windows, then nods. A pair detach and take the Grand Guard soldier by the arms to lead him inside.

 

“Don’t tell them anything,” Ramsey snarls at the soldier. Somewhere, he has dropped his sword, or someone has struck it from his hand, but he is still wearing Corvo’s mask. It droops half-off his face, half a pale cheek visible underneath the sloughing metal skin. He looks pathetic. He  _ is  _ pathetic, and yet he was one of the men responsible for Emily’s throne being stolen from under her. “If you say anything, you’ll be executed as a traitor to Delilah-”

 

Corvo reaches over to him and wrenches the mask from his face. The metal edge grazes his skin lifting off. “You’re the traitor here, Ramsey. I’d promise you a trial when Emily returns to the throne, but you’re dangerous.” He hefts the mask in his hands.

 

“So you’re going to kill me wearing that? As the Masked Felon, a common criminal.”

 

“You’d like that,” Corvo says. “No. I’m going to kill you as the Royal Protector, putting down another threat to the throne.”

 

He almost expects Ramsey to go under, to get down on his knees and go turncoat again, but the man just stands there. He looks Corvo in the eye while wearing the uniform of the City Watch, a force sworn to protect Dunwall and its true Empress, trying to pretend that he’s a man with dignity and integrity and honour, and the rage that Corvo keeps in his belly for just these kinds of moments bubbles over. With a swift kick, he takes out Ramsey’s legs and puts his sword to the man’s throat and  _ pulls _ -

 

The Overseers stare at him while he wipes the blood off his hand and his sword, before the Outsider approaches from the gate and they scatter inside and out to recover the masks of their fallen comrades and assist in the interrogation of the last Grand Guard man. Overhead, the sun is beginning to ripen to gold.

 

“Thank you,” Corvo murmurs.

 

The Outsider watches him refold his sword and strap it at his waist, alongside his mask.

 

~

 

The Overseer outside the archives does not deny them entrance this time. As they enter, Alexi is lowering her shirt, originally bunched up around her chest, and Corvo glimpses a line of ugly puckered stitches marching across one of her ribs before they are covered by grimy blood-stained fabric. “Welcome back,” she calls. “They told me you took care of the enemy forces outside. I’m sorry I missed seeing you tackle those mechanical things. Sorrier I couldn’t help.”

 

The medic, who is knelt beside Alexi on her cot still, snorts.

 

“What’s your condition?” Corvo asks her, but the medic is the one who answers, turning his scratched mask towards them.

 

“She’s plenty stable. Shouldn’t go anywhere today, but as long as she keeps drinking elixir and treating with herbs, she’ll recover. Ideally she’d be under medical supervision for the rest of that recovery.” The medic sniffs again. “I doubt that’ll happen, so I showed her how to take her own stitches out if you can’t find anyone else trained to do it in two weeks time.”

 

“Two weeks?”

 

“With limited strenuous activity,” he emphasises, and rubs his hands together. “Now. Royal Protector, you were fighting a moment ago, are you injured? I’m sure I have other people to attend to, so if you are then please speak up now.”

 

Corvo glances down at himself - he has blood on his clothes from Ramsey’s execution, blood from falling onto an Overseer’s corpse, the remnants of oil and grime from the clockworks and a layer of general dirt from a lack of access to baths over the past few days, but he has sustained nothing more than a few scrapes and strained muscles. A massage would be welcome. “No. Nothing you can fix with elixir.”

 

“I am,” the Outsider says.

 

“You?” The Overseer medic looks past Corvo at him, pale eyes meeting the Outsider’s new pair of tinted glasses. “Aren’t you the - oh! High Overseer.”

 

They turn to see that Khulan has indeed entered the archives behind them. He motions off the flurry of Overseer activity behind him and shuts the doors, turning to Corvo. “Your skill at dispatching your enemies is still unmatched,” he says, and then puts a hand to his chin hesitantly. “Although, Corvo - I wish you had spared Ramsey. He could’ve given us and you more intelligence than a mere foot soldier. Vengeance-” He breaks off, mouth half-open, and Corvo realises that he has twitched involuntarily at the last word.

 

_ Vengeance _ . His other purpose, the twin shadow of duty and resolve and protection, because when everything you have is stolen from you, you have no other recourse but to cut down the thieves. Khulan doesn’t know how strong revenge runs in his veins; why would he? He has never taken from Corvo like Campbell did, like Drew tried to.

 

He tries to loosen his posture, shrugs. “At the very least you should be able to get the names of Ramsey’s lieutenants from him. That will help you know who to target in the Watch. You might be able to bring them down altogether.”

 

“Is that… what you want? To bring the Watch down?”

 

“You told me yourself the corrupt are slaughtering the loyal,” Corvo says. “We can rebuild later, when Emily is back on the throne. In the meantime, we need to make the streets of Dunwall as safe as possible for her when she returns, which means removing the men from the Duke and those who were paid off.”

 

Khulan nods tersely. “I hope you realise that you can’t stay here,” he says, gesturing to Corvo and the Outsider and Alexi on the cot all three. “There are beds in the barracks for tonight but after what just happened, Delilah will surely send more men here, perhaps looking for you. I cannot risk the safety of every Overseer within these walls, even for a friend, and I doubt this is a convenient place for you to co-ordinate your agents either.”

 

He’s right, partially, although Corvo also suspects that Khulan doesn’t want to risk having the Royal Arcanist under his roof for longer than necessary, even in desperate times such as these, and he can’t say he doesn’t understand why. The Overseer medic is still eyeing the Outsider sidelong with distaste. “I’ll speak with Curnow. As soon as it’s safe for us to re-locate, we’ll go. I’d like to be further down the river, perhaps head towards Serkonos myself to meet up with Emily, but there might be things I can still do in Dunwall first. I suspect Delilah used to be based here.”

 

“I… see.” The High Overseer does not look especially pleased with this revelation. If Delilah once headquartered herself in Dunwall, it was under either his leadership of the Abbey or his predecessors’. “Well. If there is anything else I can do for you while you’re here, Corvo, let me know.”

 

“Clean clothes and food wouldn’t go amiss. The Royal Arcanist’s injury needs tending to as well.”

 

“I’ll have someone see to the former,” Khulan says, then makes a jerking motion to the medic. “I’m sure Brother Mason will have no objection to making a brief examination of the Royal Arcanist, too.”

 

The Overseer medic probably has many objections, but he restrains them even after Khulan departs. He gets up from his position before Alexi and folds his arms, says brusquely, “So? Where were you injured, Royal Arcanist? I hadn’t heard you were a man to throw yourself into a fight like the one outside.”

 

“Delilah cut off my finger,” the Outsider says, and extends his hand to show the medic. Sometime recently, he has removed the bandages from the stump of his pinky; the medic recoils at the sight of red-raw skin and clean-sliced bone, as does Corvo. He had almost forgotten about the Outsider’s drastic amputation. He can’t recall him complaining about the pain for at least a day now.

 

The Outsider tells them, “It’s mostly numb now. Should I take that as a sign that it’s healing, or about to fall off and take my hand with it?”

 

“Uhm,” the medic says, peering closer. “It… looks like a clean cut. A clean amputation. Lucky.” He clears his throat. “There isn’t much I can do for it. It hasn’t festered, which is good. As long as you keep drinking elixir and treating it with herbs, same as her wound, it might heal in time. And keep it covered.”

 

“Might heal?”

 

“There’s no guarantee it’ll close completely with new skin, I mean. You’ll have some puckering, ropiness, red scar tissue for certain.”

 

The Outsider looks down at his finger gravely. “I already wear gloves,” he says. “So its appearance won’t be a problem.”

 

He does not thank the medic - Brother Mason, as Khulan named him - for his cursory glance, but Mason does not seem at all phased by it. In fact, the less the Outsider speaks to him the better as far as he’s probably concerned, judging by the speed with which he leaves the archives, pausing only to conduct a last check on Alexi and let in yet another Overseer who informs Corvo he is to take them to the beds that can be spared for them.

 

Alexi comes with them outside; she could’ve stayed on her cot in the archives, but she has decided she would prefer to be near them in case of emergency, and Corvo isn’t about to protest. The early evening air is cool, touched with humidity that hints at coming rain, and the beds they are shown to are if not comfortable at least better than the mattress on the ground in Corvo’s small safehouse. Again, he is reminded of how used to life in Dunwall Tower he has become - soft sheets, semi-regular meals, fresh clothes to exchange for when he has sweated or bled through the ones he has on.

 

That isn’t the main reason he would rather be back there, of course, but it is related to one of the last thoughts he has before he sleeps: if only he could know that his daughter is just down the hall in the royal chambers, slumbering on her own silken sheets.

 

~

 

He wakes late, long after the sun has already risen over the fog-covered river and the clockwork parts still scattered around the front courtyard. Alexi is gone from her bed, but the Outsider is sitting cross-legged on his, like he used to in Corvo’s chambers.

 

“Good morning.”

 

“Morning.” Through slitted eyes he can see clean clothes folded on the floor - a plain white shirt, dark pants and a black tunic that is miraculously not emblazoned with the sigil of the Abbey. Someone must’ve dug out old stocks. “Where’s Alexi?”

 

The Outsider’s black jacket is unbuttoned, displaying an ill-fitting but clean shirt. Another tunic rests on the bed beside him, but this one does have a sigil on it. A petty joke from one of the Overseers who apparently would find it more humorous than offensive to see the Royal Arcanist prancing around in their symbol. “She’s inside speaking with Jameson Curnow. He wants to see you as soon as you’re awake, which you are now.”

 

“Let me get dressed first,” Corvo says. He rolls out of bed with a groan and scans the barracks. Empty asides from the two of them, and the windows and doors are all closed and shaded, so he starts stripping off his grimy clothing. The Outsider watches him impassively.

 

The clean clothes are dry and pleasant on his skin, though he wishes he could’ve bathed before changing. “Has anything else happened while I was sleeping?” he asks the Outsider, who shakes his head and does not take his eyes off Corvo as he finishes dressing and straps his sword to his belt. “I’ll talk with Jameson. One of my agents will be able to help us find somewhere to hole up while we plan our next move.”

 

“Which is what?”

 

“That depends on you. You did say you had ideas on where to use that alchemical stuff, didn’t you?”

 

There is a knock at the door before the Outsider can answer, and Alexi enters, holding fast to the arm of Jameson Curnow. She looks the best she has in days, rested and fed and wearing a crumpled shirt that doesn’t have a hole through it from being stabbed; Jameson is the one whose expressive face is pale with fatigue today. “Corvo, Royal Arcanist,” he greets them. “I had word just earlier that a group of witches raided Wyrmwood Way shortly after you left there yesterday. I - that was where you went, yes?”

 

“Yes,” the Outsider says, sliding on his ocean-blue-and-gold glasses before turning to face Jameson. Is he planning to alternate them with the dark-tinted ones now, Corvo wonders. It hardly seems the time to be making a fashion statement but then, the Outsider has never had the most propitious timing. “Do you know what they were there for?”

 

“Lumley can tell you,” Curnow says.

 

“Lumley?”

 

Corvo frowns. “Her? I didn’t know she was still there or I’d have contacted her yesterday,” he says. Lumley is an agent of his, a good one, who he assigned to keep regular watch on Wyrmwood Way shortly after Martha Cottings’ disappearance. She kept up her reports for a month even after he told her to drop her surveillance; he was suspicious that she’d become more fascinated by the occupants of the street itself than her actual work.

 

"Well, she was there. I'd already reached out to her because I knew she lived in the district, so she came straight here to tell me about it."

 

He doesn't ask how Jameson came to know Lumley's address. The man  _ is  _ one of his best agents. "Is she here now?"

 

"She went straight back. In case the witches returned. She said they weren't pleased, that they didn't find something they were looking for, although they came away with all kinds of things bundled up under their arms." Jameson pauses. "I'm sorry I can't be more specific. I'm sure you'll be able to hear her full report."

 

Lumley doesn't trust him, in other words. “So I suppose that means we’re going back to Wyrmwood Way.”

 

“I’d like to see what they’ve taken exactly,” the Outsider says, uncrossing his legs and standing up. 

 

Alexi announces, "I'll come with you this time. I'd like a chance to stretch my legs and if the witches do return, I can back you up. Help my sword-arm recover." She lets go of Jameson's arm and makes a swishing motion in the air. "I'm sure the Overseers have spare sabres lying around."

 

"Alright then. Jameson, if you'd give the High Overseer my regards. I don't think we'll be coming back here."

 

"You don't want to see him yourself?" Curnow asks, eyebrow raised.

 

"I'm sure he's busy this morning dealing with the clockwork clean-up and the blow-up from letting the Royal Arcanist sleep in his barracks. Just tell him I'll contact him as soon as I can. Alexi, you and I and he will go-" Corvo takes a step forward, then looks down and sighs. "After I've put my boots on."

 

~

 

The arcane ambience of Wyrmwood Way is stronger today, but somehow far more unpleasant.

 

What merely hours ago was a solidly paved and occupied street is now littered with dead strips of black briar and disturbingly quiet. Shopfronts look like dartboards pierced by glowing orange-and-black projectiles - there is no sign that the witches who did this were targeting people with them. They seem only to have been interested in vandalism, in smashing windows and slopping ugly puddles of paint over carefully lettered signs, and in whatever it was they came to collect.

 

Alexi has walked steadily the whole way, and now she stops before one of the stores to rest her leg and examine one of the darts. She yelps when she touches it and snatches back her hand.

 

"I wouldn't do that again," the Outsider says to her, and then proceeds to pick up one of them himself, rolling it over in his hands before dropping it to the ground with a flinch. "It's painful but - informative the first time. The second will burn your hands off."

 

They have not seen any Watch men all the way here, nor witches, nor many civilians either. Corvo scans the street, searching for a sign of Lumley, and after a couple of minutes spots her approaching from the alley he and the Outsider first entered through yesterday.

 

Lumley is a small woman, short and uncomfortably thin from an early stint of malnourishment only partially due to teenage years spent during the Rat Plague. Despite being Gristol-born and bred, she has the colouring of a Morley native and keeps her black hair cropped in an unflattering style, which she has not changed since Corvo first recruited her. She walks towards them briskly and greets him with "Sir."

 

"Lumley. I had no idea you were still watching this street."

 

She shrugs. "Good thing I was. I saw the two of you the other day, which is why I can tell you that they went to the same place you did. Not before they went halfway up and down the street smashing windows and doors though. That new Empress of ours really seems to have it out for this place. Who're your friends, sir?"

 

"Captain Alexi Mayhew," Alexi says, detaching from the wall where the Outsider is still conducting a - visual only - examination of the damage caused by the witches' powers. "You look familiar."

 

"I was River Patrol, before." Lumley's mouth thins in a quick smile. "That life didn’t really agree with me after a years. Only thing I kept was a knack for calling people sir." She looks towards the Outsider, but doesn't comment on his lack of introduction, instead saying, "You wanna check inside?"

 

They trail after her towards the alchemist’s shop, and Corvo can immediately detect a strong smell carried on the faint breeze from the smashed open door. Footprints shaded in a blue powdery substance lead in and out, human and dog, and the object he saw before leaning against the window is missing. The glass is shattered. Lumley steps over some of it on her way through the door.

 

Inside, the mess is much worse. All the shelves Corvo carefully examined are overturned or cracked in half, wood torn apart by black briar. Alchemical ingredients line the floor in clumps of dried animal parts and plants; smashed bonecharms add to the stock of whalebone shards, mixed with more broken glass from the spectacles display. The Outsider tiptoes across the floor peering at the destruction while Lumley talks, tells them that the witches visited next door too but came out empty-handed.

 

“There were four of them,” she says. “Looked close to my age, so late twenties. Dark hair - one of them had none, and they all had those creepy pale eyes. Skin the colour of mouldy cream that went black or red or green when they used their powers. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” Her own blue eyes are hungry as she describes them. “Delilah must be the most powerful witch in the Empire if she’s even stronger than they were.”

 

The Outsider stops before the wrecked spectacles rack. “The things they took were mostly plant-based,” he interrupts. “Dried algae, dyes, pigments. Some other things that weren’t, hair, crushed beetles. She’s painting again.”

 

“Painting?” Lumley asks the question before Corvo can. “Why would she be… painting?”

 

“It’s how she weaves her magic,” the Outsider says. “Her most powerful magics. Her portraits can enchant, entice, change the very nature of a person. They can influence the world around her in subtle ways.” He pauses, picks up a piece of bone from the ground. “Although sometimes they’re just paintings. Everyone needs a hobby.”

 

_ Copperspoon. A painter.  _ A small tempest of bells rings in Corvo’s head. “She was a society painter,” he says slowly. “Wasn’t she? I remember the name now, vaguely. Sokolov mentioned her years ago as having been a student of his briefly, but I never met her. I can’t remember ever seeing any of her works.” And Jessamine certainly never talked about having a sister. Daud never said a word to him besides half-hearted begging for his own life. He couldn't have known about Delilah, and yet it gnaws at him.

 

“You would if you’d seen them.”

 

After a minute more of digging through the scattered mess on the floor, the Outsider makes his way around the front counter to the back-room and opens the door, which creaks in protest and falls half off its hinges. Something, a sword or briar, has severed them at the top. He steps around it and disappears into the back-room.

 

Corvo follows him, and Alexi and Lumley join them at the entrance to a surprisingly spacious but window-less workroom that has been transformed into an equipped alchemy laboratory into a sea of shattered glass. There is no sign of the shopkeeper; then again, the residents of Wyrmwood Way are likely used to fleeing at a moment’s notice. The Overseers conduct regular raids of the street that Corvo has approved more than once. A ring of lit candles is arranged in the centre of the room and the oil lamp overhead hangs dark to create flickering areas of shadow at the edges.

 

“Did the witches do this?” Alexi asks over Corvo’s shoulder. “I mean, of course they did, they would’ve burnt the place to the ground if those candles were there already, but why would they set something like this up?”

 

The Outsider crouches down, blows out one of the candles. “A message.”

 

“So like… a threat?”

 

In response, he pulls out the jar of ghastly reddish liquid he bought here yesterday and unscrews the lid. “I wasn’t going to use this here, but just a drop might let me - see through to what she’s using those ingredients for. Maybe.”

 

Somewhere behind Corvo, Lumley inhales sharply. The Outsider raises the jar in his hand and takes a step towards the circle of candles, but before he can do whatever he was going to, there is another light, unearthly and glowing green, in the shadows of the workroom and the gutteral snarling of a wolfhound - except that whatever comes at him isn’t a wolfhound.

 

It might’ve been, once. When Corvo springs into action and unfolds his sword, jams it into the creature’s side from neck to groin to stop it from tearing into the Outsider with dusty green-brown claws, its flesh gives way like a wolfhound’s, and it squeals very much like one. It disintegrates into ash with a yelp the instant he withdraws his blade, leaving only a skull. He reaches out a hand to help the Outsider, thrown off-balance by the attack, back to his feet; the Outsider does not take it and instead stabs a finger at the skull. “Corvo - you have to crush it,” he says urgently. “ _ Quickly _ , Corvo-”

 

He isn’t fast enough. The revived wolfhound howls, claws at the ground, and launches itself at Alexi, but she’s quicker than he was, quick enough to draw her borrowed sabre in one fluid movement and skewer the wolfhound through the belly.

 

Its skull drops to the ground again. The Outsider is up beside it quick as a flash and stomps hard on it.

 

“What in the fucking Void was that?” Lumley demands. She is staring at Alexi’s outstretched sword from behind her. A few specks of dirt fall from it.

 

The Outsider says, “A gravehound. Raised from dead hounds and made immortal unless their heads are destroyed.” He turns up his nose at the smashed bone fragments on his boot and rubs it on the ground. “If only Delilah’s immortality were that simple. I’m not certain anymore this is a good place to try the tincture. We really need somewhere she has been herself, somewhere she’s worked.”

 

“You said she used to be based here,” Corvo says.

 

“Yes. At Brigmore Manor.”

 

“Brigmore!” Alexi has sheathed her sabre after wiping it clean of what Corvo can now only assume was grave dust. “That’s out north, up-river. We’d need a boat, and a better one than the tiny thing we crossed the river in earlier. And the new owner is-”

 

“Don’t worry about him. He’s a friend,” Corvo says to her dubious expression. “A carefully cultivated one.”

 

He has to think about the boat, though, as they exit the back-room and watch their feet on the floors back outside. He has acquaintances and colleagues amongst the Navy, the merchant fleet, the nobles rich enough to own sea-worthy vessels for jaunts down the canals and back, but he cannot think of a single person who is both alive and easily accessible and who he would trust in a city filled to the brim with turncoats trying to save their own lives & businesses under the new Empress.

 

Someone who doesn’t live in Dunwall, then. Who visits multiple ports and is loyal to money above most else. “Draper’s Ward,” he says aloud.

 

The Outsider has vanished again, into the store he went into yesterday to buy his nail polish, but Alexi and Lumley are still there to frown at him. “The riverfront,” he adds by way of explanation. “The entire district was a gang-infested wasteland shortly after the plague. Smugglers still drop at the harbour there sometimes, since it’s easy to package stolen or smuggled luxuries with the real ones being used by the tailors there. It’d be a place to start. The only real problem is getting back across the river.”

 

“Of course,” Alexi says. “The fog.” She gazes back at the alchemist’s store thoughtfully. “Kaldwin’s Bridge is the main way across on foot, but the Watch checkpoints there - one person could get past them if you were fast or especially stealthy, not three. Unless you’re planning to go ahead on your own, Corvo-” and she says this in a tone that makes it perfectly clear she would not be onboard with that particular plan- “Then the bridge is out.”

 

Lumley runs a hand through her hair and says, “What about the freight line?”

 

The carriage line and lift that run underneath Kaldwin’s Bridge to carry heavy cargo without disrupting foot traffic would be large enough to fit them all, surely, but- “All the lines are powered off,” Corvo points out. “The freight line has to be lit up with oil tanks from both sides of the bridge at once, too.”

 

“Well, I know you have other spies,” Lumley says. “One of them can do it if you get a message to them. I’ll take it myself if you like. I’ve run Watch checkpoints before.”

 

Corvo looks at her, standing with arms folded over her nondescript civilian clothing, blue eyes a few shades darker than that of the Outsider’s Void, and gets an odd feeling. “I thought you wanted to stay here and keep watch in case the witches came back. It’s not a bad idea, if you’re still interested.”

 

“They saw me. And spoke to me,” she continues quickly before Corvo can speak up, ask her why on earth she didn’t tell them this earlier. “One of them invited me to Dunwall Tower, actually, invited to be her… sister. She told me if I ever wanted a sweet taste of the power that all of them have, then I should go to the gates and offer myself to Delilah. I’d - rather get out of the district than run into them again and have them decide I’m not worth asking a second time.”

 

“She’s recruiting.” The Outsider has emerged from the other shop and taken a place beside Corvo silently, staring down Lumley behind his fancy glasses. “That’s interesting. I wonder if she realises she’s going to need more than she has to be able to keep all her subjects in line. Delilah has always been a single-minded person.”

 

Lumley returns the Outsider’s hard stare briefly before looking at Corvo again. “So, sir? D’you want me to run the message? I think I know just who to take it to.”

 

He knows who she’s thinking of, and he hopes he’s doing the right thing pushing down that strange feeling in his gut. If Lumley were about to stab them in the back or call witches down on them, she would’ve done so already. “Alright. There’s no need for you to come back across the bridge, so tell her to light it up at midnight. We’ll be able to move more easily late.”

  
“Roger,” Lumley says.


	5. chapter four: 21st Day, Month of Earth, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm alive......................... i hope you all had a wonderful holidays & new year and Thank You for everyone who left comments (on anything lmao) they were like water to a dying man in a desert (my motivation over the past month) :*

Dunwall at night is quiet, but never this quiet.

 

A long time ago, during the Rat Plague, it was similar to now, civilians driven inside out of fear or driven away in the plague carts and tossed into the Flooded District, dead or barely alive. The quarantine blockade kept most ships away, and the only animals on the street besides the rats were the hounds kept by the Overseers. The loudest thing in those days was the speaker on every street giving everyone who cared to hear updates on the antics of the Masked Felon.

 

And yet, Dunwall had returned to normal over the past fifteen years. Horns from the river, the sounds of people living their lives inside their homes, the occasional mewl of a stray cat or dog from the gutters. Delilah has brought silence to this city once again, and it sets Corvo’s nerves singing with anxiety.

 

They have spent the day and part of the night in a small apartment on the edge of the Distillery District not unlike the one overlooking the Boyle Estate, with cracked walls and barely space enough for the Outsider to pace. Corvo might have done the same. The twist in his gut has returned, recalling the hungry look in Lumley’s eyes and the reason he pulled her off Wyrmwood Way in the first place, but he has no choice except to trust her now.

 

He trusts the person she should have given her message to at least - with his life. The carriage line under Kaldwin’s Bridge is in view from their path along the river, taken at a brisk walk by Alexi and a half-jog by the Outsider, who has switched spectacles. The almost unbroken darkness of a Dunwall without streetlights shadows his eyes so deeply that one could be forgiven for seeing him with three mouths, two yawning black as the night sky.

 

From here, they can also see the Watch checkpoint at the mouth of the bridge. Cigar smoke drifts from a lone man leaning over the side; his compatriots are not ordinary soldiers but a large circle of gravehound skulls and a single clockwork soldier, standing with its head hung against one of the hut-like buildings that comprise Watch checkpoints the city over. Corvo motions the Outsider and Alexi into the shadows.

 

They won’t have to pass the single man to reach the underside’s carriage line, since a short staircase leads directly down from the street and plateaus in a loading platform of sorts, but there is still the matter of an oil tank. “The dispenser is on the bridge inside the first strut,” Corvo tells them both quietly.

 

“We couldn’t have brought one with us?” Alexi whispers back at him. She glances up and down the street. “You’re going to go for it, aren’t you. We’ll check on the platform.”

 

He’s already planning his route towards the strut. Alexi has a sword, and the Outsider may have never been in a fight before, but he knows how to run away if one breaks out. Corvo looks out at the horizon, over the Wrenhaven to the clocktower rising above the river’s fog and the dark silhouettes of a city that is no longer his. It must be nearly twenty minutes to midnight.

 

“Leave the tank to me,” he says, and motions to the bridge.

 

Alexi nods. She and the Outsider break off from him and trot across the street, shrouded from sight by the unbroken darkness. As he expects, the guard on the bridge does not see them, focused as he is on his cigar. A flare of embers illuminates ashes falling from the end into the river; the only other light sources out tonight are the lanterns set at the checkpoint itself in a small glowing circle.

 

_ Good _ . Shadows are the ally of stealth, and the more the better considering he no longer has the ability to Blink between them. Corvo circles past the mouth of the bridge to the side opposite the guard and takes a few steps towards the first strut.

 

A gravehound skull stirs from its supernatural slumber the instant his feet hit the ground a third time. It sniffs - it can still  _ smell _ , he realises with dismay - and snarls and rouses up off the ground in a tiny pillar of green light before settling itself at the head of a corpsedust body. Another skull follows suit a moment later, and the guard turns around.

 

“Huh?” he says, squinting past the border of the lanterns. “Who-”

 

Corvo may be old, but he is still fast, and the threat of the dormant clockwork gives him an edge of adrenaline. Drops of black blood hit the river. The man chokes, and Corvo pulls out his sword, pushes on the body so that it falls limp against the side of the bridge.

 

One of the gravehounds bays. He doesn’t even look at them or the clockwork soldier, which thankfully has made no noises of awakening yet; he runs, flat out with his sword still drawn and bloodied. Kaldwin’s Bridge is a dark and featureless expanse in front of him, shifting up and down minutely with the pounding of his feet, the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears.

 

The first strut of the bridge looms ahead. His hand slaps hard on the outside wall as he races through the door to the guardroom, a wide and empty space dominated by a huge slit of a window that on a pleasant day might give you a view halfway to Kingsparrow. All he can see right now is fog and black and the oil tank dispenser is around the corner, anyway.

 

At his heels, something snaps with crusted teeth. Whirling, his bloody sword catches the hound in the side. It barks; Corvo plunges his foot unhesitatingly down on the thing’s skull. He keeps moving.

 

By some luck, a tank is already in the second dispenser, and all he has to do is press the lever and watch the viscous oil be pumped into the tank. Viscous and luminous - the flood of oil catches the moonlight the instant leaves the tap, flaring into a white beacon. He should’ve known he wouldn’t have been able to stealth it back across the bridge even if he wanted to. There are a lot of things he should’ve known - now isn’t the time.

 

Corvo hoists the tank in his arms and sprints out of the guardroom.

 

Back out on the bridge, clutching the tank in one thick forearm, he moves slightly more slowly, assessing the situation with what light he has. Gravehounds, the now awakened clockwork, sniffing the air or listening for his movements. None of them followed the one he just killed, apparently. There is no longer a clear path back around to the stairs Alexi and the Outsider took.

 

_ Stairs _ . An idea takes shape in Corvo’s head full-formed. He starts to run again, trailing one of his hands against the edge of the bridge, making for the thin and rapidly fading light of the dead guard’s cigar.

 

“Detection protocol,” the clockwork remarks. He tightens his hold on the oil tank. If this were another night, another place, it would’ve been the perfect weapon with which to destroy the clockwork then and there, but it is only ten minutes to midnight, maybe less. He almost trips on a gravehound rushing at him, sidesteps it and shifts the weight of the tank to his left arm.

 

He knows where the stairs and platform are, was privy to the construction plans when they were built, but it is still nerve-wracking when he reaches out with his right hand and uses the force of his run to vault himself over the edge of Kaldwin’s Bridge, away from the snapping jaws of dogs raised from the dead. The clockwork says something; he cannot hear it over the rushing of wind.

 

Corvo lands, and immediately hugs the tank with both arms again, steadying himself. The freight line’s carriage is in front of him; Alexi stares at him, blue eyes wide.

 

Five minutes to midnight. The dogs can be heard above him as he turns, shoves the tank with both arms into the receptacle. The bank of levers set beside the freight line clatters to life; Corvo pulls the one which will activate it from this end and clambers into the carriage with Alexi and the Outsider and a wooden crate of what smells like old ale.

 

Alexi peers up at the barks echoing down through the metal and brick of the bridge, says, “Are they coming down here? Or will they assume you went into the river?” She doesn’t question whether he killed the guard.

 

“They can smell us,” Corvo says. His gaze is fixed on the panels of lights and levers, on the specific lights which will tell him that on the other side of the bridge, his agent has placed a matching oil tank in a matching receptacle and pulled the lever that will let them cross to meet her.

 

The hounds are getting louder, accompanied by the clicking thunks of the clockwork’s footsteps, rounding the side of the bridge. Alexi reaches forward and pulls shut the door to the carriage, latches it with unsteady hands. The Outsider is hunched up in one corner with his legs pulled almost to his chin, and he says, “Not long now. That door won’t stop them when they come. You’re sure of your agent’s timing, I assume?”

 

Small footsteps sound on the steps down to the carriage line, and then a gravehound is in sight, galloping at them with brittle teeth bared. Across the river, the clock tower strikes the hour. The lights on the panel flare to life - the carriage jolts, beginning to move, and the gravehound makes a giant leap for the door. Corvo’s hand snakes to his sword reflexively.

 

He doesn’t need to worry. The hound misses the carriage and slides on its dusty belly to the very edge of the carriage platform, watching them move slowly away with utterly blank eyes. Its undead comrades join it after a moment; the ugly stilt legs of the clockwork are barely visible when they pass through the infrastructure of the bridge’s first strut and out of sight. He hears Alexi breathe a small sigh of relief.

 

The carriage clatters and rattles on beneath the bridge, through square holes bored in the foundations to allow it passage. None of them speak; they look out the carriage windows at the dusty dirty stone of the bridge and, when the carriage settles with a clank onto the section of line taking it over the middle of the bridge, at the foggy river below. Tendrils of mist curl upwards like smoke from a fire, from incense burning at a shrine. They give Corvo a bad feeling, but soon they disappear and the carriage is making the last few shuddering metres to the other side.

 

He waits until it comes completely to a stop before he opens the door. The sounds of gravehounds and clockworks are nowhere on this side of the bridge. Instead, a weathered, friendly hand reaches out to help him out of the carriage. Corvo takes it, steadying himself on solid ground once more. “Thank you,” he says.

 

“Don’t mention it,” Cecelia says. She peers past him to Alexi and takes her hand too, but offers nothing to the Outsider slowly unfolding himself. “You can all stay with me tonight. It’ll be a bit of a squeeze.”

 

“We can manage.”

 

His best agent is dressed dark but not black, in a navy jacket and dark brown pants, things that camouflage better in the dark than black itself. A glove on her hand serves the same purpose Corvo’s cuff wrapping does, although Cecelia never used the powers she was given before they were unceremoniously taken away again. He hasn’t seen her in perhaps two weeks. She says, “Follow me.”

 

They traipse up the stairs to street-level - the carriage platform on this side of the bridge is a mirror image to the other. As they rise, Corvo becomes aware of a sudden drop in temperature here, a coldness that grows with every step he takes after Cecelia. A breeze blows from Dunwall Tower to their west, a wet chill rising off the river. He wishes he had another coat.

 

Cecelia leads them a roundabout path through backstreets that Corvo recognises, some more than others. Fresh graffiti or fresh bodies disguise alleyways he might’ve been in half a dozen times, and the night covers everything in a thick blanket of shadow. The lack of streetlights makes navigation difficult; at some point, the Outsider takes his hand, and Alexi’s shoulder often bumps his. Cecelia strides on ahead.

 

She stops finally at a nondescript apartment building of red-brick that could be found on any Dunwall street corner. They are, by Corvo’s calculations, somewhere north of the old waterfront, having walked steadily away from the Estate District. Cecelia turns her key in the front door and beckons them in, turns on a light that displays to Corvo from the outside that the windows on the top two floors are boarded up.

 

“Home,” Cecelia says. She sweeps her cap from her head and motions them all towards a fleabitten couch that dominates most of the bottom floor, tiny as it is. Her key goes into her pocket, not onto the key-rack nailed besides the door, and she double-latches the door behind them. Corvo helps Alexi to the couch and sits down himself, realising as soon as his back hits rat-gnawed stuffing and itchy fabric exactly how tired he is.

 

“You got Lumley’s message,” he says to Cecelia, who takes a wooden chair across from them like an interrogator. “Where did she go?”

 

A low table strewn with papers fills the space between the two chairs. The Outsider stretches out his legs as if to rest them on it, then thinks better of it and curls himself into a black-haired black-spectacled ball. Cecelia shoots him a nervous glance. “Towards the Estate District,” she tells them. “She didn’t say where. I thought you’d given her new orders, so I didn’t ask. I’m… glad you’re alive, Corvo. And you, Alexi.”

 

Alexi frowns. “Have we met?”

 

“No,” Cecelia says, her smile shrinking. “I - we haven’t. I know of you. I’m Cecelia, by the way.”

 

An awkward silence follows her words, since Alexi now has no need to introduce herself and the Outsider has never needed any introduction to Cecelia. She  _ knew _ , when she first met the Royal Arcanist, even though the Outsider had never shown himself to her beforehand. Maybe it was the Mark she’d never used. Corvo shifts on the couch. “We’re planning to find a ship at the riverfront tomorrow. A smuggler who’d be willing to take us out to Brigmore Manor. Any suggestions?”

 

“Brigmore?”

 

“Delilah’s old base,” the Outsider says. Cecelia’s eyes slide over him, unwilling to settle on him completely.

 

“Oh, of course. There used to be witches there, didn’t there? I keep track of the ships that track at the riverfront, but not the past few days. I was looking for you and Emily and making sure everyone at the shop was safe. You can use it tomorrow as a stopping point. You should. I keep some things in the back that might be useful to you.” She pauses for breath. “Is Emily safe?”

 

“She’s in Serkonos. So, more or less.” Corvo sighs; it turns into a yawn that he hurriedly tries to stifle.

 

Cecelia gets up off her chair and turns it against the wall. “I’m sorry, I - you must be exhausted. I made sure there’s blankets and things upstairs for the three of you, and food and tea for the morning - nobody will look for you here for now. It’s not wonderful, but I’m sure you’ve all -  _ we’ve _ all slept worse places.”

 

The blanket-covered stretches of floorboard on the third floor that she shows them to are hard, and the blankets themselves are a touch scratchy, but Corvo has to agree with her. He’s slept in mud; the Outsider has rested his head in the shallows of the Void itself; all of them spent a few nights in an apartment almost the same size as this one. Cecelia sets an oil lamp and wishes them a good night, and although Corvo would rather spend the rest of the night talking with her about the state of their city, he says it back.

 

~

 

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. Nor does he remember the Outsider curling up against his back like a bony ruler, one thin arm slung low over his waist, but both of these things have happened during the night.

 

Corvo cranes his head to see Alexi still asleep on her blanket on the other side of the room. Her hands are balled in fists under her chin. The first slivers of daylight peek through the cracks in their boarded windows, and he can hear the shrill whistle of a kettle downstairs. “Did you sleep well?” he mumbles.

 

“I didn’t sleep,” the Outsider says matter-of-factly, and his arm tightens around Corvo, hand brushing his hip. It might be a pleasant morning, waking up to a lukewarm body in bed with him, if not for the fact that they are in Cecelia’s house and still on the run, and so Corvo sighs and shifts out of the Outsider’s grasp. He gets up from the floor. The Outsider does not.

 

After a minute of watching him lie perfectly motionless and stare off into space, Corvo goes downstairs. Cecelia’s - current - home is technically a safehouse, a building owned by the Empress apart from the two downstairs apartments, and it is the second which she apparently occupies. He finds her sipping tea in the kitchen and flipping through an account book. “Morning,” she greets him. “I sent word to the shop to expect you, Corvo.”

 

He pours a cup of tea for himself - no Serkonan coffee in this kitchen - and sits down beside her. “Curnow is taking charge of my agents for the moment,” he says; Cecelia flinches, briefly, and he guesses she is thinking of Callista. “He’s with the High Overseer. I trust him to at least keep the man safe.”

 

“You won’t need information where you’re going?”

 

“Different kind of information,” Corvo says. “Delilah’s military forces aren’t as concerning as her supernatural powers. The-” He stops himself. “He. He can find things out at Brigmore that we can use to stop her.”

 

Cecelia brushes a curl away from her face. Her hair is longer than it used to be, curling almost into ringlets where strands have escaped from a thin ponytail. “Where will you go from Brigmore? If Emily is in Serkonos, then-”

 

“I’ll go to her.” He doesn’t like tea, but the heat of it, almost scalding the back of his throat, is bracing. Tea leaves, he remembers absurdly, are used to tell fortunes sometimes, by the kind of people who lived in Wyrmwood Way until Delilah’s witches chased them all out yesterday. “She’ll clean Serkonos of its filth and then we can get rid of Delilah together.”

 

“You’re going to… wait until she’s back to kill Delilah?”

 

“She deserves to take revenge herself,” Corvo says, which sounds silly when he says it out loud and yet  _ right _ , and Cecelia nods like she understands. Delilah stole from him, stole his home, stole the peace he had built with knives and bones for his daughter, but she took Emily’s throne. She took Emily’s  _ name _ \- she is Emily Attano now on the posters, which makes him feel warm and furious at the same time. She deserves to be the one to plunge a sword into Delilah’s heart. She deserves to have her mother’s name.

 

The stairs creak faintly. Corvo turns to see the Outsider, black spectacles in place, descending them. Alexi follows him more slowly; she still looks tired. Her red hair is limp and uncombed, and her complexion is, if not ashen, still unhealthy.

 

They take cups of tea and join Corvo and Cecelia at the kitchen table. The Outsider gulps his like a man dying of thirst even though Corvo knows for a fact he also doesn’t like tea, and gazes intently at the dregs at the bottom of his cup. Cecelia gets up, ostensibly to find breakfast things, but she still cannot look at the Outsider directly.

 

Alexi clasps her cup in her hands and says, “Do you think we could get messages out of the city? Lumley ran that message across the bridge, after all. I’m sure the post isn’t running anymore but a courier, maybe. I’d just like to get a letter out.”

 

“To who?”

 

“My family,” she says steadily. “To let them know I’m alive. I know they’re out of the city; they will have left the moment this all happened and gone back home.” Her sureness reminds Corvo of himself a few days ago, refusing to believe anything other than Emily’s continued survival. “Potterstead isn’t that far away. They’ll be there now.”

 

He certainly isn’t going to suggest otherwise. “Do you have siblings, Alexi?”

 

“A younger brother. Feliks.”

 

“That’s a Tyvian name,” the Outsider says, looking up from his cup. “But you aren’t Tyvian.”

 

“My great-grandmother was,” Alexi tells him. Her tone is a mite defensive now, and she sits up straighter. “My father named the both of us - he liked Tyvian literature because of her, his grandmother. He told me stories that she told him a long time ago, and I know people always think of Tyvia of the frozen north but it sounded so homey in those stories. Families flying kites and racing dogs in the summer winds, then huddling around fires in the winter, eating stewed boar and making shadow puppets in the light from- oh, thank you.” She breaks off as Cecelia sets a plate of toast and fish out of a tin in front of her.   
  


Conversation ceases shortly while they all eat the fairly meagre meal. The Outsider finishes his last mouthful and says, “I used to live in Tyvia.”

 

Alexi looks at him doubtfully. “Have you been there, Corvo?”

 

“Once.” A lifetime ago, begging aid for a plague that seemed determined to wipe out his city, his and Jessamine’s. He hadn’t seen much more than the capital - really much more than the chambers of the High Judges. “I didn’t know you lived in Tyvia.”

 

The Outsider does not reply. He rubs his nose and gets up from the table, empty plate in hand, and Corvo hears the chink of a dish hitting the counter from an unsafe height as he elbows in beside Cecelia to start washing it up. "You don't-" Cecelia starts, then stops, purses her lips. She turns to look at Corvo, who shrugs. The Outsider likes washing dishes, he's said before. He likes the water on his hands and besides half the cleaning staff in the tower won't touch anything he's eaten off.

 

"Well," Cecelia says. She has already put half a foot of space between herself and the Outsider and looks to be inching further towards the stairs. "We'll go when you say. It's better if I take you to the shop myself. I need to check on something."

 

Corvo nods, and she turns and almost flees the room. She is still terrified of the god that Marked her hand, even powerless, and he can't exactly blame her. Nobility and their armed guards are one thing, one thing she has managed to overcome her reflex to duck her head from - the Outsider is another.

 

He rises from his chair and says to Alexi, "When you're ready," and heads back upstairs to collect his gear, such as it is. He doesn't think they'll be staying another night.

 

~

 

They enter Draper's Ward following the canal, a glittering blue-black thread winding from the riverfront and dead-ending in a thin square - really a rectangle - of high shopfronts. This canal was drained for a time during the Rat Plague, shuttered off after the ward was abandoned to the gangs and then brought low after one too many people were drowned in it. To the west, barbed wire is still strung at the edge of a railing that rims the canal.

 

Cecelia’s shop is in the opposite direction of the riverfront, on the right as they approach from the wide circle they have taken around Draper’s Ward’s several blocks to avoid patrols. The ward is mostly deserted. Nobility are at home packing their things and readying to flee the city, shopkeepers are either at home or sequestered in the back of their business with the lights out counting coins. Oddly enough, there is an ‘Open’ sign in the front window of the dark-green shopfront tucked away in the corner of the main arcade, though the door is locked. Cecelia fiddles with the key while Corvo glances at the nearby shutters and door that lead to a former textile mill and gang rathole, now converted to storage space for most of the stores in this arcade - a smuggler rathole.

 

The scent of leather and polish washes over them the instant they step inside; Alexi coughs discreetly. “You run a cobbler’s? Not what I would’ve expected for a friend of Corvo’s.”

 

Cecelia turns and spreads her arms wide. The inside of the shop is perfectly lit, not too bright and not too dim, and the walls are a pleasant shade of pale green, all the better to highlight the browns and blacks and tans of her merchandise. “Well, I don’t know how to make shoes,” she says. “But I can hire people who do. People talk in places like this when they’re trying on shoes or being fitted for a custom job.”

 

“She just manages the place,” Corvo says. He keeps his eyes trained on the Outsider, who has made a beeline for a pair of kid leather calf-high boots. Their buckles are made of polished whalebone.

 

“I took over the Hound Pits Pub after old Samuel died, too. Discovered I have a head for business and saved up rent for this place.” Cecelia’s smile is soft, nostalgic. “But we aren’t here to talk about me. The things I want to give you are in the back, Corvo,” and he notices that she addresses only him, beckons only him towards the back of the shop. Alexi and the Outsider are absorbed in picking over her wares, so he leaves them and follows her past two floor-to-ceiling shelves of shoes.

 

A sewing machine clicks. The young woman at it, a fair-haired girl barely out of her teens, looks up sheepishly. “Hi.”

 

“Lettie,” Cecelia says. “You should be at home.”

 

The girl curls her fists in her lap. The workbench she is sat it is one of several pushed against the walls of this back-space, though hers is the only sewing machine. The benches are covered with half-finished shoes, cuts of leather and other fabrics, brushes and planing boards and knives and scissors and needles thin as toothpicks that you could shove into somebody’s eyes. “I feel safer here,” the girl says quietly.

 

Cecelia pats her shoulder gingerly and asks, “You still have the key I gave you?” She gets a nod and gives a smile in response and walks past the girl at the sewing machine to a door in the left wall. Corvo shuffles inside.

 

What he presumes is Cecelia’s office is a tiny, tiny room, furnished only by a desk and chair and a locked and latched door: a back escape route. She takes a key from her pocket and unlocks the top drawer of the desk; immediately Corvo sees something that does not belong with the rest of the papers and trinkets in it.

 

“This isn’t mine,” he says, because he knows that his own crossbow is back in Dunwall Tower, locked in his own desk. This one bears a strong resemblance to it, but its lines are cruder, its grip less weathered. It has none of the upgrades attached that he or Piero have fitted to it over the years.

 

Cecelia passes it from the drawer to him. “It was one of Piero’s prototypes from when he was designing yours. I found it in his old workshop, years ago. It isn’t the same, but it still works well. I’ve kept it in good condition. I practice with it sometimes.” She reaches back in and comes out with a fistful of arrows, which Corvo stows in a pouch. She gives him elixir, too, and a couple of springrazors and another pouch - “Money, since you can’t go to the Imperial coffers.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“It’s alright. I like to think of it as repaying a debt.” Cecelia smiles. “I’ll walk you down to the riverfront.”

 

The girl is gone and her sewing machine switched off when they exit the office. In the front of the shop, Alexi is leant against one of the huge shelves of shoes watching for them; her eyes catch on the crossbow strapped at Corvo’s waist now, but she does not remark on it. The Outsider stands up straight and falls in line behind them as they head out, Cecelia locking the door behind them.

 

The Millenary Canal has no bridges across it like some of the other canals, so their small party has to skirt it completely to get to the riverfront. The mid-morning sun beams down on empty streets, closed stores, but the freshly-cobbled alley that leads down to the wharf itself is entirely in the shade of the tall buildings around it. Tan cobbles turn to grey stone underfoot halfway down to the riverfront.

 

Corvo takes the lead. A single ship is docked this morning; more people than they have seen the whole way here are on the wharf loading and unloading from it. Some look like dockhands, some like the ship’s crew. The former must be well-paid to venture down on a day when the majority of people who work in Draper’s Ward have stayed home. Out of the pockets of criminals and smugglers, no doubt.

 

A man who looks like crew stops them approaching the boat, grunting out, “Your business?”

 

“We’re looking for a ship to take us up-river,” Corvo says.

 

The man squints at him, then at Alexi and Cecelia and the Outsider. “Wrong place, mate,” he says. “You want the tower docks maybe. We don’t do passengers unless they’re stowaways, and stowaways still get one o’ their fingers cut off.”

 

“Who captains this ship?” He gives it a closer inspection. It’s not a particularly large vessel, but a well-made one, painted or oiled the colour of Serkonan rosewood. A green fish adorns the side visible to them -  _ a green fish _ . “Never mind, I know who.” He pushes past the man, who opens his mouth to be offended. Corvo is already several steps away from him by the time he manages to get out a “Hey!”

 

“You know the captain of this ship?” Alexi asks. They walk closer to the boat, past dockworkers and crew who are quickly noticing their presence. A young man runs ahead of them onto the boat and disappears into the hold - good, Corvo thinks, good because he will have gone to get the person or people who might help them up-river. “Not personally,” he replies.

 

They stop, all four of them, at the edge of the wharf, and Corvo folds his arms. He only has to wait a minute or so before a woman comes up out of the hold. Her face goes curiously tight when she sees him.

 

She has dark skin, a few shades darker than her ship, and black hair tied in a short ponytail that flops over one shoulder, and when she reaches them she has a more confident expression on her flat features. “You’re the Royal Protector,” she says.

 

Corvo nods quickly, sharply.

 

“What business do you have with my ship, Royal Protector? I’ve had an agreement with the City Watch here for years.” She cocks her head to look closer at Alexi. “You’re Watch, aren’t you? Mayhew. Finally decided to renege on your promises?”

 

“They weren’t made by me,” Alexi says. “In any case, the City Watch isn’t in any position to keep its promises right now, if you haven’t heard. We’re here to ask you if you’ll take us to Brigmore Manor. Quickly and quietly.”

 

“Is that a joke?”

 

Corvo says, “Your name is Elinor Cuirass, correct?”

 

The woman snorts, tugs at one of her ears. “That’s right. You’re as perceptive as they say, huh? Got it first time. And we don’t take passengers. This is a cargo boat through and through, crew only, not for any price.” She grins without humour. “I have heard, Mayhew. You don’t have the backing of the throne anymore, which means you wouldn’t even have the gold to make me an offer.”

 

Behind him, Corvo hears the Outsider shifting, getting ready to say something, so he says it first. “Morgan Hyde.”

 

Elinor Cuirass stiffens violently. “What the hell,” she says. “You know  _ her _ ? What does she have to do with this?”

 

“Think of it as a favour to her,” the Outsider chimes in, then says more softly, to Corvo, “I didn’t know you knew that name.”

 

Cuirass stares at them, her face unreadable, and it seems that every dockworker and crewmember on the wharf is staring at them too. The hair on the back of Corvo’s neck is standing on end when she kicks the deck of her ship with a scuffed boot and says, “Fuck. I’ll think about it. But you four get out of here and come back in a few hours, when we’re done unloading, alright?”

 

“Sure.” She has already turned away and headed back down into the hold before Corvo can say anything else. He shrugs, turns to Alexi and Cecelia. “Unless we come back tomorrow, this is probably the best we can hope for. She’s right about us not having enough money to bribe her.”

 

Alexi looks between him and the Outsider and says, “Who’s Morgan Hyde?”

 

“Complicated,” Corvo tells her. The Outsider shakes his head and sweeps his spectacled gaze over the wharf; most of the people who were staring at them swiftly drop their heads and get back to work as he looks at them. Then, he says, “Corvo. There’s trouble.”

 

Trouble is footsteps that neither Corvo nor Cecelia could hear over the end of the conversation with the ship’s captain - trouble is a veritable pack of Serkonan Grand Guard soldiers, with a single navy-uniformed Watch tramping behind them, carving a path through the dockworkers on the riverfront, smiles on their faces and guns in their hands. Five of them, and in seconds they are close enough for the head of the pack to wrench on Cecelia’s arm.

 

She slaps at his hand; he tugs back and delivers a kick to the back of her knees. “Royal Protector,” he says, a big lug of a man whose pale blue uniform brings out the pastiness of his complexion. “Royal Arcanist.” The other four soldiers are surrounding them. Once again, the attention of every uninvolved person on the riverfront is on them. “What a piece of fuckin’ good luck meeting you here.”

 

“A little bird told us you’d be looking for a boat,” another man taunts. He puts his hands on Alexi’s shoulders and pushes down hard, until she gets to her knees like Cecelia, then he moves on to the Outsider, kicks him in the shins for good measure. Corvo stands still. “Must be so hard having to depend on rats like the rest of us.”

 

“Not even rats would feed on your rotten corpse,” the Outsider says suddenly, on his knees. The soldier’s head snaps to him; he does not retort, but his foot hits the Outsider between the shoulder blades full-force, slides down his neck until he is crushing the Outsider’s cheek against the ground.

 

The soldier hisses, “ _ Fucking _ heretic. We’re gonna turn you all in to the new Empress and get our reward from her. Or the Duke, whichever one pays better-” He grinds his booted foot until the Outsider makes a pained noise. “Whichever. You’re gonna burn.”

 

“Cool it,” the first man says, but he makes no move to hold his comrade back. Corvo’s teeth grit harder. “Anyway, if you didn’t notice, you’re under arrest. I’ll ask you to surrender all your weapons to these men immediately.”

 

He would’ve cut and run the instant he saw them if he didn’t have other people to worry about, people who can’t fight or aren’t armed for it. He is still hesitant to draw his sword even now, because of the guns, because of the Outsider’s face pressed hard on the ground, but Cecelia falls, a calculated fall that carries her entire weight and crashes into the legs of the man who just told them they are under arrest. He stumbles, and at the same time the Outsider reaches up and sinks his painted nails into the bare ankle of the man with his foot on his face.

 

Alexi’s borrowed sabre, the one he’d almost forgotten she has, flashes, severs the tendons in the back of the first man’s legs. He goes down. Corvo draws his own sword and leaps at the men holding guns, prays that they don’t shoot on reflex. At least if they do, he’ll be the one who gets shot.

 

They don’t shoot. He cuts one’s throat while he’s on top of him, fallen over from Corvo jumping at him. The people on the wharf are scattering now that a real fight has broken out; he hears rather than sees some crew boarding the ship again, and gets up to see Alexi gutting the man who was crushing the Outsider’s head.

 

To his dismay, the fifth man, the Watch soldier, is already running from the fight on staggering legs. He must know Corvo’s reputation - and Alexi’s - better than the Serkonans, must think it better to cut his losses and escape with the information that the Royal Protector and company are about to board a ship with a green fish painted on its side. Corvo stabs the fourth man, the other he brought to the ground, and draws his crossbow.

 

A bolt flies from somewhere behind him and rips through the Watch man’s temple. He trips and falls to the ground, dying quickly. 

 

Corvo twists to see a woman stood on the deck, holding a larger crossbow - at first he thinks it’s Elinor Cuirass. This woman has the same dark brown eyes, the same nose, wide at the tip and narrowing at the bridge like someone has pinched it between their fingers, but her hair is shorter, and frizzier. She lowers the crossbow.

 

“I guess you’re coming with us after all,” she says, and nods at the bodies. “Get the corpses in the water and get on the ship. That goes double for the rest of you,” she adds in a yell to the remaining crew on the riverfront, then walks away, towards the bow.

 

He takes a moment to recover from this fight, over so very quickly that he almost feels whiplash burning along his jaw. Sheathing his sword helps, as does bringing the Outsider to his feet, brushing the dirt from his cheek. “That must be a new experience for you,” he says.

 

The Outsider smiles wryly; there is a speck of mud at the corner of his lips. “Having my face shoved against the ground? It’s one of the few sensations I remember from being human the first time.”

 

He has no idea what to say to that. Yet another tiny revelation about the Outsider’s past life, thousands of years ago, dropped casually at a moment when he has no time to press him on it, to ask more questions. That’s probably the idea.

 

The sound of dragging on stone is Alexi, who has also sheathed her sword and grabbed one of the bodies by the armpits. She sets his shoulders at the edge of the water and kicks the dead man in the crotch. His body slips into the river, then surfaces again, bobbing. It will be a day or so until he sinks, and the rest of them. Cecelia lugs another body on top of him; Alexi fetches a third. Corvo goes for the one who nearly got away himself.

 

When there are five bodies in the water, the woman who shot the fifth man reappears from the other end of the boat and gives them a curt, “We’ll cast off in ten minutes,” before leaving again. Alexi watches her go. “Twins?” she suggests.

 

“Bethany Cuirass,” Corvo says. Twin sisters and twin smugglers. He hasn’t had reports on them in some time, perhaps because of whatever agreement they have with the City Watch. Had. Many things in the criminal underworld will likely shuffle as a result of Delilah’s coup - the entire city, changed in an instant. He sighs. “We should go.”

 

Cecelia brushes her hands on her pants and stands up straighter. “I’ll see you later, then.”

 

“You’ll be alright?”

 

“Of course,” she says. “You and Emily will find a way to kill Delilah, and then we can put everything back. Rebuild it better. We’ve done it before.”

 

They both have other people’s blood on them in spots, dust in others, but neither of them mind, so Corvo steps in and hugs her, a loose grip around her shoulders that serves for a goodbye. A temporary one. He knows he’ll be back soon, and so does she. So does Delilah, sitting on her stolen throne, who he hopes dearly did not get her information from Lumley but suspects that his hope is in vain.

 

The ship’s deck sways as they step onto it, and as Cecelia vanishes into the gloom of the Draper’s Ward alley, Elinor Cuirass comes up out of the hold once more. “We’re about to set off,” she says, eyeing the three of them. “Brigmore, was it? That’s only a day out. You better not make trouble til we’re there.”

  
“You’ve nothing to worry about from us,” Corvo informs her. She looks skeptical; she says nothing, though, and within minutes they are free from the riverfront dock, heading for the outer rim of the fogged-over Wrenhaven.


	6. chapter five: 22nd Day, Month of Earth, 1852

Beyond Delilah’s fog, Corvo learns within the first hour of traveling on the Four-Eyed Flounder, there is sunshine and temperate weather quite appropriate to the season. The fog has an outer radius, and the Cuirasses have learnt it well.

 

“The fog shifts up and down, too, you could probably make trips through it if you learn the patterns - if there are any. Looks random to me. Maybe it depends on the moods of our new Lady Empress.” Elinor smokes a cigarette as she speculates, covering the flame carefully with her hand and flicking the butt overboard when she’s finished. She has become talkative slowly over the course of their trip, like a cat uncurling slowly, claws out.

 

The Outsider leans over the edge of the deck next to her and says, “It does.”

 

Alexi is below in the hold, resting, and Corvo might be there himself if it weren’t for the Outsider, who seems determined to stay staring out at the river for their whole trip. He stands, neck craned down, looking at the water like he is about to leap overboard, and Corvo sits on the sun-warmed deck and watches him. Elinor talks, mostly about inconsequential things. Her sister is presumably below deck as well.

 

He learnt the name of the ship from her before she vanished down there, thanking her for killing that final man. Alexi asked her what the green fish was and she answered - “The Four-Eyed Flounder. Not very intimidating, is it?”

 

“Who says we need to be intimidating?” Elinor had shot back, a taut smile on her lips. “We aren’t pirates, we aren’t thieves. We’re honest and law-abiding citizens taking goods across the sea for coin.”

 

Bethany said, “Sure,” and went down into the hold.

 

The sun is just beginning to lower across the horizon; rays hit the fringe of trees on the shore and bounce off the water all around them, sending light glittering off small waves. Corvo stretches one of his hands behind him to feel the solid wood of the deck under his palm and uses the other to shade his eyes. They must be getting close to Brigmore now, not that you can see it from the river - the manor is reached from an inlet, a natural harbour that is one of the reasons the man who currently owns the land bought it in the first place.

 

“You two know who lives at Brigmore, don’t you?” Elinor says, looking between the Outsider and Corvo, ponytail bouncing from shoulder to shoulder.

 

“A friend.”

 

“Fillmore is a friend of yours? Hmph. Still milking what he did during the plague for all it’s worth, pretending he’s retired from all that and just living away from the world. As if he doesn’t have his prick in half the crooked stills in Dunwall as well as the legitimate ones. We haven’t hauled for him for years.”

 

Corvo squints up at her. “Sounds like you have a grudge.”

 

“Grudges are more my sister’s specialty. It won’t stop us putting you off there, so don’t you worry about it.” Elinor pulls at her ear. “You’re not staying there long, are you. You’ll be after the Empress. Unless she’s dead?”

 

He has his mouth open to say it isn’t any of her business, but the Outsider says, “She’s very alive. On her way to Serkonos.”

 

“Serkonos. Then I guess that’ll be where you head next. It won’t be easy to find a ship to take you all the way there from Brigmore. Maybe from Potterstead.”

 

Again, the Outsider answers her, head tilted almost coyly. “I would say we’re standing on a ship that could take us there right now.”

 

Elinor laughs - a short, barking sort of laugh. “What would we do that for? We have no business in Serkonos. I owe Morgan, but I don’t owe her  _ that  _ much. Far as I’m concerned we can part ways at Brigmore and never see each other again.”

 

“You could do it for the favour and gratitude of the Empress.”

 

“Former Empress.”

 

“Future Empress,” Corvo counters her. “Delilah won’t be sitting that throne longer than another month.”

 

She raises an eyebrow, shrugs away from his hard-eyed stare. “I’ll think about it, Lord Protector. But like I said, we don’t have business in Serkonos. We’re Morley born-and-bred, you know. Not too fond of the weather down in the south.” She leans back to the water and whistles. “Well, how about that. We’re coming up to your turn-off already.”

 

The riverbank’s thick coating of trees parts just ahead and starboard, curving and stretching into the inlet where the Four-Eyed Flounder plans to drop them. The grass is oddly brighter and greener as the ship turns - Corvo can already feel the deck swaying under his hands - and a fine blue mist shivers off the water and disappears. Brigmore Manor lies straight ahead.

 

He gets to his feet carefully and joins the Outsider at the front of the ship. The manor is a huge white monolith planted in a garden of rocks and greenery, and with every closing metre Corvo can see more signs of the restoration work that began eight months ago at great expense; here a hint of scaffolding at the edge of the east wing, there fresh whitewash painted over old, greying stone. The last time he was here, the manor had a stone wall in front of it with an iron gate that had been ripped off its hinges by the passage of time and the crumbling of the stone. The wall has been demolished now, its absence marked by a thick swath of ground that lacks grass.

 

He does not expect the manor’s owner himself to meet them at the dock; he doesn’t, but there are two men waiting for them all the same. Elinor hops from the ship to the ground neatly and shades her eyes, nods to them. “Passengers to see your boss. We might be tied up here for a couple hours if that’s alright.”

 

“Just keep to your vessel,” the taller man says curtly. He sounds more like Watch than an ex gang member, which most of Azariah Fillmore’s men are. “No problems. Who is it wants to see the boss?”

 

Alexi rises up out of the hold, blinking in the sudden brightness. Somewhere below, a fresh shirt has been gifted to her, a dark blue blouse almost the shade of her Watch uniform and blessedly clean. She and Corvo and the Outsider step off the boat together, Alexi’s hand barely touching Corvo’s arm to keep herself steady, and Corvo says, “That would be us.”

 

The tall man with a clipped voice looks him up and down, pauses his scan at the mask and crossbow strapped to his hip. “Lord Protector. We’ve been expecting you.”

 

“You - have?”

 

“The boss thought you’d send a message, not come yourself, but he knew you’d do something.” He points a thumb over his shoulder. “You know the way to the house. He’s in the west wing library.”

 

His thumb remains a signpost aimed towards the house until Corvo gives him an awkward “Alright.” Neither of the men seem inclined to accompany them; the shorter one eyes the ship speculatively. He wears a leather jacket that has copper-brown bottle caps for buttons, shaved to fit the buttonholes.

 

“I recognise him,” Alexi says once they’re out of earshot. She walks without needing assistance now that they’re on solid ground, padding through the grass that reaches almost to their ankles, and she sounds sharper than she has in days. “He’s an old Bottle Street Boy. In and out of lock-up when I was still a trainee. I knew Azariah Fillmore had some connections, but-”

 

“His name was Slackjaw, a long time ago,” the Outsider says without breaking stride, and Alexi nods thoughtfully.

 

Broken spokes of wood jut from the cliffside halfway to the house, remnants of an old staircase up to a winding path along the rocks. Corvo follows it with his eyes to the greenhouse he recalls from previous visits, still entirely free of glass and tangled up with vines and debris. The house is the priority, he supposes. Fillmore has been living there for six months to oversee the reconstruction personally. He’s sent him updates from time to time, friendly notes talking about stripping out the east wing, re-laying floors in the west.

 

The smell inside is testament to the latter - fresh timber and floor polish. Corvo stifles a sneeze from the amount of wood dust floating just in the entrance hall and steers them left to the west wing, past two women talking in hushed voices who barely glance at them. Construction workers or gardeners or former gang members recruited as security - likely not the latter or they would’ve asked more questions.

 

Brigmore’s west wing library is up a stripped-wood staircase and round a short hallway. Corvo finds it easily, Alexi and the Outsider trailing behind him as he swings open the door into a room that barely resembles a library. There is a single thin bookcase, but it stands barren and dwarfed by a huge armchair upholstered in wine-coloured leather, upon which is seated the current owner of the manor. He cracks a grin at them; he has a golden tooth.

 

Azariah Fillmore says, “Good to see you alive, Corvo,” and crosses his ankles. His grey-silver handlebar moustache is the same as ever, although the vanity plait that used to fall halfway down his back is a third as long now. “How’s your daughter?”

 

“I don’t know.” They arrange themselves in a sort of trio tableau, Corvo in front of the old man, Alexi behind him but staring steadily at Fillmore. The Outsider inspects the empty bookshelf as if he can see a row of delicately packed spines that are not there. “It’s good to see you as well, Azariah. You’ve met the Royal Arcanist, and this is Alexi Mayhew.”

 

“Watch Captain Mayhew? Oh, yes. Your reputation precedes you. And what brings you all to my doorstep? Besides our change in government.” Fillmore sucks his teeth, makes a face like he’s tasted something sour on them. “Another coup. Another rotten apple who doesn’t give a whale’s cock about anybody but themselves and their ass on the throne.”

 

“She used to live in your house,” the Outsider informs him. He probes the air between the shelves tentatively.

 

Fillmore’s gaze snaps to him. “Here? Fuck. No wonder the place was abandoned for so long before I snapped it up.” He uncrosses his ankles and crosses his legs instead, sits up straighter in his chair and then stands. He has the slightest of height advantages on Corvo now. “That’s why you’re here, huh. I can tell you straight out she didn’t leave anything behind. This place has been gone through with a fine-tooth comb and half of it’s been scrapped and rebuilt. Someone would’ve told me if they’d found a witch’s leavings.”

 

Below them, there is a sharp bang. Fillmore sighs. “I told everyone working on the house they could cut off yesterday but they’re still at it. A dozen workers. I have to feed them all  _ and  _ my guys. And you three now you’re here.” He grins at them again.

 

The Outsider’s hand shoots out and grabs Corvo’s wrist. He twists, startled; the Outsider’s eyes are closed behind ocean-blue shades. “The studio,” he mouths, then says it again, voiced in a dreamy tone. “There’s an attic above here. Does it still exist?”

 

“You mean the one…?” Fillmore points up. “Sure. I wanted to use it as a panic room or a saferoom, y’know, because it’s not in the plans. Then the workers started dumping junk in there. You can hardly get in there for all the shit at the moment.”

 

“We need to,” the Outsider says.

 

“Well, uh, alright-”

 

“As soon as possible. That’s where it’s thinnest. Not where she entered, but where she painted. Where she weaved history with her pencils and her brushes and the Void itself as her palette.” The Outsider’s lips continue moving without sound for a moment more. His eyes are still closed. Then, he shakes himself, and lets go of Corvo’s wrist. “There’s information up there that we need.”

 

Fillmore looks between them, the Outsider and Corvo - and Alexi, stood at the ready, fingertips pressed together. “Sure. I’ll get someone to clear the room out for you, if that’s what you want. But tomorrow, huh? It’s near sunset by now, we should get some grub into you and I’d like to know what the hell’s going on in the city from you firsthand.”

 

“Sounds good to me,” Corvo says.

 

~

 

Brigmore Manor had a dining hall once, probably a very long time ago. Corvo is sure he could find it on the original plans if he checked, and that it would not be in the same place as the mess hall Fillmore leads them to from the library - and it is a mess, not a dining room. Long timber-and-iron trestle tables are pushed together under a high ceiling in the east wing; shreds of wood halfway to the roof indicate that there might have been rooms above here once. Fillmore laughs and says something about sanding down when Alexi points them out.

 

They eat fish, of course, hagfish and imported redfish and a little ox meat that an over eager cook amongst the workmen has singed. A few men and women join them, keeping their heads down and their mouths busy, pretending they aren’t listening while Corvo relates what he can to their boss about the Watch, about the witches.

 

“Outsider’s eyes,” Fillmore announces when he gets to the clockworks, and skewers a piece of redfish with unnecessary force. “Metal demon soldiers. At least the tallboys still had men riding in them that you could put a knife in the back of, eh, Corvo?”

 

Pinkish strings of light flash through the windows at the front of the house; far out in the inlet, the Four-Eyed Flounder is still moored, a cool shadow of blues and blacks against a warm sky. Corvo makes a noise of assent. Alexi seems jumpy, he notices, antsy. She is seated across from him, next to Fillmore, and she glances at him or the other people at the table between bites.

 

“There’s a ship headed here in about a week, some of my boys coming back in from Morley. I’d be willing to let you all head out on it to meet the Empress if they-” His fork stabs out at the silhouette of a boat. “-decide they don’t want you with ‘em. No idea how you convinced them to bring you here in the first place. The Cuirasses ain’t the kind of people who ride on promises.”

 

The Outsider smiles a small, private smile on Corvo’s right and pops a piece of blackened ox between his lips.

 

“That’s good of you,” Corvo says to Fillmore, although they both know that he isn’t entirely doing it out of the kindness of his heart. Azariah Fillmore has business interests that it is very unlikely Delilah gives a - a whale’s cock about. “I’m still hoping they’ll see our need and agree to take us.”

 

“Well if they do, then I’ve plans for my ship and my boys. There’s plenty of things need doing in Dunwall to prepare for the Empress to come back. Clearing out witches, restoring power, keeping as many of her loyal subjects alive as possible, things like that. I’m of a mind to send some people overland too, though it’ll take longer. Might take a few days detour to Potterstead and marshal from the Watch there.”

 

Alexi twitches. “Could you take a message?” she says quietly. “To Potterstead. If I gave it to your men.”

 

“Oh, aye, sure. Won’t get there for a couple weeks.”

 

“Thank you.” She has finished eating since the last time he glanced at her and her nails tap restlessly on the table - more jumpiness. Fillmore has eaten his fill too; after giving his plate to a man in a pale shirt that he motions over, he says, “Bryn here can show you where to stow your things. There’s space in the west wing or out in the garden. Your choice of sleeping bag: floor or grass.” Sunset glints off his golden tooth. Corvo has to wonder if Fillmore has had to make the same choice, or whether he has a bed stashed away somewhere.

 

He goes to get up from the table, to follow the man with the pale shirt and Alexi, who has already left her plate behind, but the Outsider’s slender fingers close around his wrist again. “We’ll take a walk around first,” he says, almost orders. Corvo shrugs at Fillmore.

 

~

 

There really are sleeping bags outside. 

 

Lined up on the trimmed lawn of the manor’s garden, they resemble a row of canvas body bags, empty but for clothes or small possessions tucked inside the tops. The Outsider’s grip on Corvo’s arm loosens at the sight of them, and he huffs a tiny laugh. “Imagine something like this in the gardens of Dunwall Tower,” he says.

 

Dunwall Tower’s gardens are better kept than this. The back lawn is shorn short, but tangles of weeds and overgrown trees man the perimeter. A fountain in the centre spews moss-choked water in green gouts, and everywhere there is debris from the reconstruction of the house, the demolition of what was perhaps once a shed against the west cliff. He isn’t sure why they are out here in the first place; Alexi and the pale-shirted man went upstairs, choosing the floor over the grass.

 

The Outsider walks with a purpose, though. He swaps spectacles every minute or so, his eyelids fluttering shut while he retrieves black or blue-lensed glasses and opening only once his eyes are shaded again. Corvo checks to make sure his feet are still on the ground.

 

“There,” he says. Between the black-tiled peaks of each wing there is an indent in the manor’s roof from the back, intended as a balcony of sorts, an outdoor parlour. It would be a good entry route if the shed were still there, Corvo thinks idly. If there were doors or windows to the inside. Blink up and Blink over - that might be why Slackjaw didn’t have it rebuilt in the first place. He knows the capabilities of assassins-

 

Fillmore. And he doesn’t have those capabilities anymore, as he has to remind himself again and again and  _ again _ at the moment. He doesn’t have them, but he wants them.

 

The Outsider is not pointing at the balcony. His finger is directed at the west wing’s roof. “And there.” It lowers, to the ground floor. The back wall of the house is freshly laid and whitewashed and has a fragile air to it, as if a single good windblast could crumble it in, though he doubts that is actually the case. “Delilah’s entrance was there.”

 

“Entrance to what?”

 

“Her part of the Void,” the Outsider says simply. “It wasn’t large. Barely a few floating islands, but she made good use of it. Not many others would be able to utilise the energy swirling around in there like she did. There won’t be much left now. She was imprisoned there for a long time. When they broke her out, they took the power from somewhere else.  _ She  _ takes her power from somewhere else.”

 

“What exactly did Delilah do here? In the Void. You told me a few days ago that she’d tried for the throne before.” There is nobody else in the gardens with them, oddly enough. Light hits the edges of the manor’s bulk, lances out, blinds Corvo briefly. When he opens his eyes from a flurry of blinks, the Outsider has removed his spectacles entirely.

 

They are like two holes in the world, the Outsider’s eyes. Blacker than black, darker than the depths of the earth, of the ocean, and he feels as if he has been drawn into the Void right then and there, like how they used to speak. Mostly. “Delilah has always thrived off of hate and envy. She wants to drag the powerful down into their graves, climb to the sky atop a tower made from the skulls of her enemies. That is why I Marked her in the first place. But she drives forward now because of the belief that she is  _ owed _ something that was taken from her.”

 

He doesn’t have to ask what it is.  _ Jessamine was my younger sister -  _ younger, but legitimate.

 

“She began before you even escaped from prison fifteen years ago, actually. You would never have been able to stop her, and you were too busy regardless, which is why I had to turn to Daud for help.” A tremor runs through the abyss of his eyes, like a heartbeat in the dark. “Delilah planned to cut out Emily’s soul and possess her body. Use her to become Empress, once you rescued her.”

 

“Would it have  _ worked _ ?”

 

“Oh yes,” the Outsider says. “You would’ve known the difference, perhaps, but only you, and Callista and Samuel, and none of you were about to kill what looked like Jessamine’s daughter. It was a good plan.”

 

There are slivers of ice snaked around his spine, producing a chill so cold they burn.  _ Delilah nearly- _ “Then - you mean to say that Daud saved Emily’s life.”

 

The Outsider’s smile is sardonic. “Just her life.”

 

Why didn’t he tell me, Corvo wants to question, but he knows why. It wouldn’t have mattered at all; it would’ve made his plea for mercy the same as any other criminal’s, begging clemency on the grounds that he tried to make up for what he did. What Daud  _ did _ could not be made up for. Saving Emily’s life could never bring back what he took from them.

 

Thinking of Daud makes the spears of ice freeze hotter. He shakes his head and says, “How did he get rid of her?”

 

“As I’m sure I have mentioned before, he imprisoned her in her own section of the Void. A painting, since her most powerful magics flow from paint. She was undoubtedly able to find her way out after the turmoil when I was thrown out of the Void to some other part where she could more easily contact this world.”

 

Past the dirty fountain, the back door of the manor opens and closes and Fillmore emerges, hand clapped to his forehead to shield him from a sun he quickly realises is barely visible on this side of the house. He approaches them at a steady pace. “Told some of the boys to get started cleaning the shit out of the attic,” he calls. The Outsider slips his spectacles back on. 

 

“It shouldn’t take more than three or four hours,” Fillmore continues as he halts neatly in front of them. He doesn’t slouch as much as he used to, back when he was Slackjaw - the last six months have finally cured Corvo of calling him that, too. “So long as you don’t mind searching for whatever you’re searchin’ for by candlelight, they don’t have anything better to do tonight.”

 

“The dark will be better,” the Outsider tells him. 

 

Fillmore cocks a brow, eyes the Outsider’s arm half-tangled with Corvo’s. “Right, well, while we’re waitin’ on them. You know how to handle a weapon?”

 

The Outsider looks taken aback.

 

“The Watch Captain, sure, I know she can use a sword, but you’re the Royal Arcanist.” He cracks a grin. “You don’t want to be dead weight in Serkonos, my friend. Everyone in Karnaca down to the pickpockets on the street carries a knife. I’m sure the man who won the Blade Verbena can tell you that better than me.” He palms a flick-knife; the handle is a warm colour and glassy, like amber.

 

“He’s right,” Corvo says, although of course he wouldn’t know if the streets of Karnaca are the same now as they were thirty years ago. The criminals there might carry things much worse than knives in the modern age.

 

Fillmore tosses the flick-knife. It lands at the Outsider’s feet, and he unhooks his arm from Corvo’s to pick it up with his left hand, the mutilated hand - Corvo sees Fillmore’s eyes narrow slightly at the sight of the bandaged joint - and swap it to his right. “You… want me to fight you?”

 

“No, no, lad, just - watch me. Here. We’ll start with a disarm.” He is entering an unarmed stance, legs wide, arms loose.

 

The Outsider glances at Corvo. Corvo takes a step back and smiles.

 

~

 

They move when it gets dark, to an inside lit by inartistically arranged whale oil lamps and candles. The dining hall serves for a practice hall with a few of the trestles shoved aside, barring the lower half of its windows. A few of Fillmore’s men come to observe their master schooling the odd newcomer; most leave fairly soon. The Outsider is not very good, and Fillmore is a worse teacher, more interested in teasing than drilling him on the basics.

 

Still, the Outsider’s moves have more intent to them now, more finesse. He has at least picked up a basic disarm, if not mastered it. Fillmore has a chuckle when he manages to slap the flick-knife from Fillmore’s hand and halfway across the hall.

 

He should’ve taught him this a long time ago, Corvo realises, watching. He should’ve taught the Outsider what he taught Emily as a child: how to defend herself from people bigger than her, just in case. But he has never thought of the Outsider as truly defenceless before now - never thought how easy it might be for somebody to stick another blade through the scar in his neck, using it like a guideline.

 

Fillmore saw the scar, earlier, when the Outsider’s collar slipped. “Bloody hell,” he said, and then nothing more. Corvo could tell by the flicker at the corner of his mouth that he recognised it as a lethal wound and thus not to be questioned; a wise move. Asking a man with the title of Royal Arcanist about his unsurvivable scar seems an invitation to being charged with participation in heresy.

 

Corvo traces the lines of the Outsider’s slim form with his eyes as he attempts another disarm, followed by a strike. Fillmore dodges, again.

 

“I’m going upstairs,” he decides aloud. The Outsider barely acknowledges that he has heard him; Fillmore salutes him and returns to their drilling.

 

He finds Alexi in a small room corridors away from the library, still in the west wing. It smells of pine and must, the latter being the old sleeping bags laid on the floor. Their meagre possessions are piled up on top of one each, and Alexi is using her pouch, balanced on her knees, as a desk while she sits in her sleeping bag, writing feverishly. “Hello,” she says, not looking up.

 

Corvo determines that the middle pile of belongings and accompanying sleeping bag is his. “To your family?” he asks, although he already knows the answer.

 

“Yes.” Alexi dots a period at the end of a sentence and turns to him, biting the inside of her cheek. “How long do you think we’ll be here? I mean, three days at most, right. Then Serkonos.”

 

“You don’t like it here.”

 

“Nearly everybody here is a criminal,” Alexi says. “Or used to be. It reminds me - of what I should be doing. I should be out in the streets of Dunwall keeping order and putting men like these behind bars. Making sure that the Empress’s city is at peace so that she’s safe. And instead I’m tucked away in bed writing letters to my family while the Empress is somewhere across the ocean having to keep  _ herself _ safe.” She sounds sick. Disgusted with something, perhaps herself. “I want to be doing something, but I can’t.”

 

“You were injured taking a blow for Emily that you’re lucky didn’t kill you.” Corvo understands her jumpiness now, quite well. “You-”

 

Alexi says quietly, “I can’t come to Serkonos with you, can I?”

 

“What are you talking about?” He keeps asking questions that he is entirely aware of the thought behind today, always one step ahead of Alexi and her path of reasoning. It is the same as the one he would follow were he in her situation.

 

_ You don’t want to be a dead weight in Serkonos, my friend.  _ “I’m injured. I can fight, but not well enough to help the Empress with - with Karnaca yet. I won’t recover quickly enough on the voyage there, and I’d have to have my stitches out at sea, they might become infected somehow. I’m too much of a risk.” The reasons roll off her tongue easily, like she has already spent hours pondering them. 

 

Corvo sighs. “I don’t mean to leave you behind, Alexi. We can see where we stand in three days.”

 

It sounds weak, an excuse to not have to face this subject anymore. She seems to accept it, though. “I… Alright.”

 

The scratching of her pen fills the room again shortly. Corvo takes his mask from his pouch and inspects it as he as had not had a chance to since he retrieved it, eyeing every new fleck of blood and dirt. He does not bother to wipe them off. The face of a ghoul deserves proper decoration.

 

Alexi finishes her letter while he stares into its glassy eyepieces; she licks her finger between each flick of a sheet, checking that it contains everything she wants to say, and then she folds it up neatly and stows it in her pocket. Her demeanour puts Corvo in mind of himself when he has the displeasure of writing to families of officers killed in the line of duty: a teeth-gritting solemnity. He might’ve been writing one to her family, if circumstances were different.

 

At the door, a wraith appears - the Outsider, made paler by the light sweat the drills have drawn from him. He might easily be mistaken for a living corpse in the lamplight. “They’ve finished clearing the attic,” he says.

 

“That was fast.” Corvo puts down his mask and gets to his feet; he glances at Alexi, who shakes her head. She watches the Outsider rummaging in his things for the red tonic but makes no move to follow them when they leave the room. Any curiosity she might have about what the Outsider is going to tonight has been dampened by her general mood.

 

In the passage, they meet Fillmore on his way to bed. He half-bows and says “Good luck,” which the Outsider thanks him for and keeps walking, making his way to the short metal staircase that leads to the attic as if he was born here. Corvo is a step behind him until they are in the attic itself.

 

It does not seem possible that art could ever have been created in this place as it is now. Corvo has seen artist’s studios of all kinds, tidy with every tool in its place and the opposite, but the attic has something bleak and crude to it that does not match with the rest of the house around them. The decay from which Brigmore is slowly being rescued has its source here; bare beams across the high ceiling look like to crumble to sawdust at any second. The floor is clear but here and there debris still juts from the walls, lies in heaps of moulded paint and broken wood.

 

The floorboards are patchy-coloured, too. Corvo is almost afraid to step off the stairs in case his foot goes through the ceiling and showers rotten wood onto Fillmore’s book-less library. “This is where Delilah painted, you said?”

 

“She did her groundwork here. Sketches. She often kept a lantern here that was filled by a mixture of whale oil and paint made of crushed bone. It was a key for the other witches.”

 

“A… key?”

 

“To her domain.”

 

The Outsider paces the attic as if he is measuring it, up and down, length and width. The floor creaks under his boots. His cheekbones are underlined by the only light in the attic, candles set at each corner; he carries the red tincture bottle in his unsullied hand and his fingers are skeletally white.

 

Corvo watches him from the stairs. He has no idea how this is going to work, besides the inevitability of the Outsider drinking that nasty concoction, and he isn’t sure he wants to ask.

 

Even that assumption is proven wrong almost immediately, when the Outsider picks up one of the candles. Crouching, he unscrews the lid of the tincture, allows a few drops to fall onto his hand, and tilts the candle. The flame flickers blue - and red? - and the liquid vanishes, subsumed into the air. With further prompting, a good third of the bottle is evaporated in this fashion; the air around the Outsider takes on a reddish tinge in Corvo’s vision.

 

He tries to keep worry from his voice. “Will that affect me?”

 

“No,” the Outsider says. He looks around the attic as if he has never seen it before, as if he is somewhere new, and stands back up. The cloud of air, darkened to maroon, follows him like a personal bubble.

 

More pacing comes after this, and Corvo notices that he will no longer allow himself to step inside the borders of the attic, only walking a line around the edges except when he reaches the stairs. He avoids Corvo by means of a parabola, the blood-coloured air bubble coming within inches of his mouth and nose. It smells of nothing.

 

Finally, the Outsider takes one single step towards the center of the room again. He cranes his head, looking at something that isn’t there, and then stumbles over nothing.

 

He cannot help reflex. Corvo is at his shoulder in a second as he has always been at Emily’s when she trips with a hand to stop her from falling. The Outsider tries to push him away. The red air is already around him when he pulls back, realising his mistake, and the corners of his vision blur. “Ah,” the Outsider says. “This-”

 

Corvo shuts his eyes. He hears the Outsider saying, “You’ll be alright, Corvo. This wasn’t intended for you, but it shouldn’t have ill effects here,” in the way he does when he is stretching the truth. When he opens his eyes again, there is no floor.

 

Rather, the floor of the attic is transparent, like glass that somebody has spilled coffee on. Beneath them is the ground storey of the manor, but not the one that they are in right now - the ground storey of a house in disrepair. There is no second floor, or it exists only as a rectangular balcony that overlooks what might have been a ballroom or another dining hall.

 

In the centre of the room sits a painting. In the centre of the painting sits emptiness, a maw of darkness comparable to the Outsider’s eyes, set in a gilt frame. Delilah’s entrance to the Void, he has no doubt. It exudes itself in a familiar way, has a familiar scent to it, an ozone and copper tang so strong he can taste it.

 

The Outsider says softly, “You see it? I’m trying to open it. There are traces here from when she was there.”

 

The attic’s candles barely light the scene below them and yet Corvo feels like he can pick out every detail of the old manor, the past manor. The entrance to the Void thrums at the edges of its frame. From time to time, he glimpses a real painting underneath it, blue Void-sky and the pretty purple-ish green of a garden in spring bloom, and while he stares, the Outsider starts to move again. Across the clouded glass floor, over the head of history.

 

He does not know how long he stands there. He should be terrified, but this is practically nothing compared to the  _ real  _ Void. It isn’t even really there anymore.

 

The Outsider reaches out his hand, the one with a finger joint missing. He twists it in mid-air at the humming nothingness at the centre of the painting, turning an invisible door handle, then waves it, smoothing down an invisible bedspread. The world stutters; they are in the Void momentarily, then back above the painting. Corvo’s head spins. The Void opens up before them again.

 

A hideous noise bellows in his ears. The Outsider’s spectacles shatter, the black ones, and shards of tinted glass catch the light as stars in the Void’s starless sky, reflecting images across Corvo’s eyes of people, places he doesn’t recognise and some that he does: Delilah, Emily, Jessamine as a child, the Flooded District during the plague, the silver mines of Karnaca, a debtor’s prison somewhere in Dunwall. He squeezes his eyelids shut against the torrent but it continues, from a place inside his own skull.

 

Then, silence. The air bubble disappears, popped by the reality and solidity of the attic of the present reasserting itself, covering up the floor with mouldy brown wood again. The Outsider, Corvo sees, looks thoughtful and yet unsatisfied. “It wasn’t here,” he says. “I expected too much. She wasn’t brought through here.”

 

“You’re saying that was for nothing?” Corvo asks. His tongue is dry.

 

“Not at all. Delilah was brought through in - in-” The Outsider mouths something, chews at the air. His eyes, exposed through the gaps in his broken spectacle lenses, roll back into his head, which Corvo can only see by virtue of a disturbing yellowing at the back of his eyeballs. He collapses. This time, Corvo barely reaches him before he hits the ground.

  
The Outsider is out cold. He does not wake for another two days.


	7. chapter six: xxth Day, Month of xxxx, 1852

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M ALIVE and would you believe it i started writing this the day Before the new expansion was announced...
> 
> thank you to everyone who's read and commented on this fic during this. long and video-games induced hiatus i love & appreciate all of you very much? i hope you enjoy this chapter and the next one will not take like, four months to get here i promise. come hassle me on twitter @aerynlallaboso if you like

He walks in a rose garden in mid-afternoon.

 

This garden is in Karnaca somewhere, he knows from the scent of silver dust on the breeze. Corvo would know that smell anywhere. He knows the crunch of the gravel under his feet, the particles of dust clogging his nose and crusting on his lips. This is where he grew up, except for one difference: there were never any roses in Karnaca. Nothing grows in dead soil, and silvered soil is dead by any measure, and yet - here they are.

 

The roses change colour. They were red, now white. As he watches, they grow and twine, interlock their thorns. Their stems are the same colour as their flowers and their petals no longer look soft to the touch; the sun casts a marble glow to them. They are sculpted roses but _alive_ , living and moving together.

 

Corvo’s feet stop of their own accord.

 

The roses form a shape in limestone grey. They have taken on the texture of clay being moulded by unseen hands in the creation of this thing, this unearthly being. It is nearly his height, humanoid, with an awful smile, teeth shaped by thorns, and he feels that he has seen the shape before - in dreams, barely remembered.

 

It is a woman. She says, with a tongue like a thin pink petal, “My dear Royal Protector. Your mind is a slippery thing to enter. But here I am at last.” She spreads her arms; her fingers have more petals coating the nails, black as night.

 

“What do you want,” Corvo says, with difficulty. Silver dust crumbles from his mouth as if he is made of it.

 

“Just checking up on my darling sister’s lover.” Karnaca’s sun is setting over the rose garden, and the sky is turning potpourri pink, but the colour does not touch the woman’s luminously pale skin. It reminds him of the Outsider, whose skin is bleached the white of whalebone washed up on the seashore. “Aren’t I allowed to pay a visit to family?”

 

Dust crumbs up his lips, sticks to his throat. He cannot say no, you cannot. No, we are not family. _No, do not put her name in your mouth._

 

There is something in the woman’s hand. Corvo spies it between her twitching fingers, something brown and white and gone again, like a coin trick. He tries to follow her hands, but his gaze is drawn inexorably to the sky, the last curve of the sun’s golden yolk slipping beneath the edge of the world, and the thing is hanging around her neck.

 

He strains his eyes to see it-

 

~

 

Creaking and swaying. Corvo’s eyes are incredibly dry as he blinks them open, as they have been every morning. The sea air disagrees with him immensely in his older age; it is all he can do to wipe the crust away from his lids and see the other human form less than a foot away from him. “Hi,” he mutters.

 

“You were dreaming,” the Outsider says. He leans into Corvo, and a shudder of fear runs down his back at the icy cold of the Outsider’s hand. Odd. “I could hear you.”

 

He should tell the Outsider about what he dreamt, but already it is fading with the clearness of the morning. It probably wasn’t important. Without a deity in the heavens who delights in making smalltalk with his sleeping subconscious, dreams are just dreams. “About Karnaca. Likely because we’re close.”

 

The Outsider hums.

 

They are six days from Karnaca now, in fact. Seven and a half days at sea - the half only halved by a very long nap Corvo took in mid-afternoon to recover from the revolting homebrew spirits one of the Cuirasses’ crew makes herself - with not a peep from any other ships. If Delilah knows they are set for Serkonos, she has decided not to bother giving chase. Corvo can only hope that means there aren’t men waiting to ambush them as soon as they make port in the South.

 

He heaves himself up from their blankets on the deck and slips on some proper clothing - the Outsider watches him, not making any move to get himself dressed. He has been sluggish since he woke from his brief coma at Brigmore Manor, and unsettled. Irritated that the only information he was able to gain from tearing open the veil to the Void is that they have to go to Karnaca - “We knew that already,” Corvo told him when he sat up suddenly, like a doll animating, and practically shouted it at a terrified worker playing nurse.

 

The Outsider has promised that when they get there, when he is standing on the earth of Serkonos with a map in his hands, he will be able to tell where they have to go. Corvo, again, can only hope he’s right.

 

“Are you coming up?”

 

“No,” the Outsider says.

 

Corvo says, “Suit yourself,” and leaves him half-asleep in their small cabin to go up to the main deck. Only Bethany is in sight of the crew when he climbs the stairs; she gives him a mock salute and resumes her sewing, sat against the ship’s mast, patching a hole in her shirt while she wears it.

 

The sun is warm and bright, casting unbroken light across the sea and sky, two-toned blue that fills the entirety of the world around the boat. It makes Corvo restless to see how empty it is out on the waves with no land in sight, like a city street completely barren of people. There aren’t even many clouds up above; the wind is light, carrying nothing but the scent of salt since the day after they set sail.

 

The first day, when they cast off, there was smoke floating on the breeze, wafting over the water in tiny plumes. Through Elinor’s borrowed telescope, Corvo saw the Houses of Parliament with flames licking up their sides. He’d thought many times of setting Parliament alight, but to see it actually burning was something different. It was Delilah destroying another thing that could stand in her way.

 

He sits under the bow of the ship, where he can see only the deck and Bethany, doing her sewing. Another day to while away doing nothing but waiting.

 

Both of the Cuirasses have been nothing but pleasant to him and the Outsider, at least. He lunched with Bethany shortly before the Outsider woke up, in Brigmore Manor’s glassless greenhouse - like eating inside the skeleton of some huge animal, long dead and overgrown, he recalls - and convinced her that taking a bet on him and thus his daughter would be in their best interests, and Elinor fell in line with her sister easy enough. She owes something to the late Morgan Hyde which she will not tell Bethany about; he doubts his curiosity about it will ever be assuaged.

 

He calls her _late_ not because she is dead, but because she has probably picked up another name by now, neither Morgan nor what he called her seven years ago. The Outsider would know better than he.

 

Bethany has finished patching her hole. Corvo watches her get up and descend back into the bowels of the ship, the ship she will likely leave once all this is over with. He has promised them both a pardon.

 

Time passes. The sun sets, as it did in his dream, and all he can do is think about seeing his daughter again.

 

~

 

Corvo has the same dream that night. And the next, and the next, forgetting it as he wakes. The garden, the woman, who no longer speaks to him but simply stares and covers the thing around her neck with one delicate hand. She is fastened to the ground by rose stems; they bite at her ankles, carve deep gouges in her marble thighs, but she is unaffected by pain or disgust.

 

Her blood is black.

 

The fifth night, he remembers her name. They have been closing on Karnaca all day, the merest hint of a break in the long blue horizon jolting the itch for _action_ inside him, and it is enough for him to lick silver dust from the backs of his teeth and say, “Delilah. Why are you here?”

 

Rose stems have climbed to her waist now. She is further away; a metre and an ocean. “I told you, Corvo Attano. Checking up. Making sure you aren’t going where you’re not supposed to.”

 

“What do you _want_?” Puffing out his cheeks to spit gravel at his feet. He isn’t sure whether he or she conjured the dirt in his mouth, or whether it is a memory of his childhood. A wind gust blowing dust into the cracks of his eyes and nose and every orifice until he half believes he will be a thick heap of lead-grey dirt before he makes it home. “You want the throne - you have it. There can’t be anything more for you to take.”

 

Slick, ebony blood curdles around her hips like a sash. Delilah laughs. “You’ll be beyond my reach in Serkonos,” she says. “ _Mostly_. I won’t be able to be with you like this, dear Royal Protector, so I suppose I can show you.”

 

The thing hangs around her neck on a leather cord, a pale slip of a thing, like a whale’s tooth or a saint’s bone. Its nail is painted the same colour as the thorns are stained, and dried blood - red blood - crusts at the end of the joint. Delilah strokes it, kneads it between her own fingers. “I heard there was a vacancy,” she says.

 

Corvo shouts, but his mouth is full of dust.

 

~

 

In the morning, there is a distinctly less cheerful air amongst the crew of the Four-Eyed Flounder. Besides Elinor and Corvo himself - and the Outsider, of course, whose mood is almost always inappropriate for the circumstances - they all seem to be realising that reaching civilisation means they will have to face the fact of Delilah’s ascension again. It is quite possible that once the new Empress is done putting down roots, the future of Dunwall’s smuggling routes will be nonexistent, and thus their employment.

 

Being at sea is a comforting sort of limbo, Corvo has found. These past two weeks feel like a dream, a fading moment of peace. Far less anxious than the last sea journey he made fifteen years ago, which he spent planning every moment what he was going to say before the governors of each of the Isles, but far more aimless. He has done exactly one thing since beginning this voyage: draft a letter to Alexi, who by now is putting her skills and knowledge as a Watch Captain to work for Fillmore, planning for their return. He has a letter from her in his pack for Emily.

 

 _Emily._ They are so close, so very close. He wishes there had been a way for them to get news from Serkonos. Not because he doubts that she is alive; he trusts his daughter, trusts her abilities and her blade and the thirst for revenge that runs in their blood. He wants to know how much she’s done already while he has sat in a boat and napped off a moonshine bender.

 

The Outsider joins him at the bow as the dot on the horizon grows larger. “Home,” he says.

 

“Not for a long time,” Corvo says, shading his eyes to see it better.

 

“You’ll have to introduce me to your parents.”

 

Corvo looks at the Outsider, who is wearing his standard all-black attire. His thickly bandaged finger twinges something in his memory.

 

“And I’ll introduce you to mine,” the Outsider finishes. He smiles wide, the corners of his mouth tipping in a way that implies were it not for the confines of his human jaw, he might be smiling even wider.

 

He might have had a witty rejoinder, something to make the Outsider’s jaw reconsider its humanity, were Karnaca not upon them when he turns back to look at the horizon. It’s still a half hour off, and yet just being in sight of it makes Corvo shiver.

 

It is all there - the great bay, a half-moon crescent cut out of the ocean. The city rising up in terraces that he knows will glitter numerous as the stars in the sky when night falls, his old home district to the east marked by pinwheels and paper runways that up close will become windmills and dust run-offs. Redwoods stretch up to the horizon in thick blankets behind the city, to the mountains.

 

He has to wait until Karnaca allows him to catch his breath. Somewhere in that city, he thinks, is his daughter.

 

The Four-Eyed Flounder makes good time towards the docks; Corvo and the Outsider stay standing at the bow, watching cargo barges and whaling ships and tiny skiffs pass them by while the crew readies to dock behind them. Despite Elinor’s claims that they do no business in Serkonos, crates are being hauled out of the ship’s belly to unload, smelling of fish and spices. Elinor herself dusts her hands and leans over the side with them for a few minutes to watch Karnaca advance, a cigarette tucked behind her ear. “Sure looks nicer than Dunwall,” she comments.

 

Corvo says, “Don’t let it fool you.”

 

Elinor fishes her cigarette out from under strands of hair and grins. “Oh, I know all about Karnaca, don’t worry. Had a girlfriend from here when I was young told me the nastiest stories direct from Serkonos. We’ll be in and out once we drop you.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“Just make sure Empress Emily remembers us,” she says, and pushes off.

 

Corvo does the same shortly, as they come to a stop and tie up - this is one of the upper docks, if he recalls correctly, four long redwood piers. One of the younger women on the Flounder’s crew has already hopped ship and is arguing with a scarred man already, presumably the dockmaster; straight in front of them, a solid wall of red-and-teal painted buildings rear up behind the waterfront.

 

It smells like home, he decides, stepping off the ship. The Outsider wrinkles his nose at the dead and half-gutted whale a pier away, which perhaps is _why_ it smells like home. Whale blood and oil, death and filth: these are the scents of familiarity to Corvo. The wind blows from the west, not the east, or he doesn’t doubt he would be getting a noseful of silver dust as well. The ever-present perfume of Karnaca.

 

He wanders a little further from the ship. The Outsider follows him closely, sniffing the air, hands in his jacket pockets. He wears blue-tinted spectacles, the only ones left to him since the dark-tinted pair broke during their sojourn halfway into the Void, and curious eyes inspect the both of them as they walk. Corvo tries to keep his head down; he doesn’t think there’s much chance of him being recognised, but they needn’t draw attention to themselves.

 

“Where to first?” the Outsider asks. He sniffs again at the sight of an enormous banner adorning a nearby building, emblazoned with Delilah’s face in an admittedly tasteful purple. “I assume our goal is to find Emily.”

 

“That won’t be easy.”

 

“Why not? She wants to find us, too.”

 

“For one,” Corvo says. “She doesn’t know we’ve arrived. For another,” he nudges the Outsider with his shoulder towards a poster pinned overtop of old playbills advertising local musicians and poetry gatherings. _WANTED,_ it declares. _The Crown Killer - Assist Duke Abele in apprehending this vicious criminal, now known to be none other than the former Empress Emily Kaldwin!_

 

Beneath this sensational proclamation is the pen-and-ink sketch of Emily that still makes Corvo’s blood boil, to which the Outsider remarks, “Ah.”

 

“She’ll be hiding her face.” He desperately wishes he could do the same, but he can hardly wear the face of the Masked Felon here in public, and the piece of navy cloth he wore for his expedition to the Blayne Clinic - which feels a lifetime ago - has been long lost in their movement from place to place. He glances back behind them, at the Four-Eyed Flounder. “We should probably find a pub. Somewhere to get an update on what’s happening in the city. Then lodgings, for tonight at least.”

 

“Sensible,” the Outsider says.

 

They stroll onwards, separating to walk on both sides of a street dominated by a trough of crimson whale blood, and within minutes the docks are behind them. Corvo spares a last thought for the Flounder and her crew as the scent of salt air and chatter of sailors dissolves into the quiet hum of a large city in mid-morning; he switches to scanning nearby buildings for signs of somewhere to eat.

 

More windows are nailed over than he remembers. There was always a plague of white-sheeted scaffolding and barred off staircases in the summer in Karnaca, to coincide with a fresh of wave of bloodflies nesting, but now they decorate every second building. Apartments, a storefront advertising watches - Corvo lowes his face. A blue-uniformed member of the Grand Guard ambles past them.

 

The guardsman’s outpost of origin is shortly ahead, and beyond it a plaza that is almost familiar, all limestone and teal-painted shopfronts and none of them closed up. The Outsider points out one with windows tinted ash-grey; _Little Cullero_ is lettered across one of them. “I remember this place,” he says.

 

“You… do?”

 

The Outsider offers no explanation. He steps from Corvo’s side and trots inside _Little Cullero_ , which turns out to be - once Corvo hurriedly catches up to him - a bar of some sort, perhaps more upmarket than most of Dunwall’s alehouses. The few customers are younger men accompanied by single glasses of wine, poring over newspapers or furiously writing in notebooks; the Outsider thus looks barely out of place when he seats himself at the bar and orders a cup of coffee.

 

“Not wine?” Corvo asks, slipping onto a seat beside him.

 

“It isn’t even noon,” the Outsider replies, as if that’s stopped any of the regulars. One takes a short break from his scribbling at the far end of the bar to side-eye him.

 

The coffee is brought to them by a fair-haired woman with an oddly Tyvian accent; she takes Corvo’s coin and watches impassively as the Outsider slides his asked-for drink over to Corvo without saying a word. “You’re new in town,” she says. It isn’t a question. “I’d steer clear of the Grand Guard, if I was you. They’re jumpy about strangers.”

 

“They didn’t stop us when we came through.” The Outsider is attempting to feign innocence, and it is fascinating to watch. “Has something happened? We’ve been at sea.”

 

The woman’s eyes widen momentarily in irritated disbelief. “The Crown Killer, that’s what happened. Murdered the Grand Inventor in his million-coin house and probably did in the woman who ran the royal museum just last night.” She waves her hand behind them; Corvo looks over his shoulder to see a stack of old newspapers on a rack beside the door. “That one won’t be in there, but you can read yourself.”

 

The Outsider says, “Thank you,” and goes to fetch a paper while Corvo drinks his coffee. It isn’t as good as the stuff he imports.

 

Spread out on the counter first is a black-and-white article about the death of Kirin Jindosh; the Grand Inventor, builder of an enormous mansion and profferer of an open invitation to breach the walls of his ever-shifting house, oh thrillseekers and curious persons of all backgrounds, if you wish to test yourself against its mechanisms. “A psychopath,” the Outsider says, thumbing through the next paper. “He built the clockwork soldiers for the Duke. A fine first target, though difficult to reach. You taught her very well.”

 

 _Dead Bodies In The Streets!_ reads the next headline. Corvo moves his coffee cup to discover that several guard posts a district over have been re-staffed with fresh recruits after a mysterious individual - _thought to be the murderous wretch known as the Crown Killer_ \- cut the throats of every man assigned to that stretch of city. A body or two were left in the street on full display, while others were hidden in blockaded buildings, on rooftops, in garbage bins, their blood blackening to the shade of shoe polish before they were finally found. _The Duke has yet to issue a statement on these killings, only to refer to the Crown Killer’s Wanted poster; a rendition of such is printed on the reverse of this page._

 

There is much editorialising about Emily’s background in these fresh newspapers, but Corvo barely has time to read much of it before the Outsider has laid a new sheet of deaths and possible sightings in front of him. He orders another cup of coffee and reads that the former Empress has been seen in practically every district by now. Her hair is dyed blonde and red, and she has shed the trappings of royalty for a sinister black dress sewn of bloodfly wings. This rumour is published directly above a cook’s account of a shadow killing every soldier stationed at the Addermire Institute for Infectious Disease.

 

“A sanitorium?” he says to the Outsider. “What could they possibly have Grand Guard stationed there for?”

 

The Outsider pushes another paper at him. “They don’t anymore. Corvo, this one is important.”

 

This last sheet, which the Outsider filched from an empty table, is from this morning and details that a body was discovered last night in the Royal Conservatory by a security guard opening for the morning, alongside the theft of a valuable prototype. Official word from the Grand Guard suggests that the killing was conducted as part of the robbery. The body was later identified as that of the Conservatory’s curator, a woman whose knowledge will be greatly missed from the world of the arts. Her name was Breanna Ashworth.

 

“The woman who used to visit Wyrmwood Way,” Corvo says, running his finger underneath her name. “Delilah’s friend. Another-” He stops short.

 

_He walks in a rose garden in mid-afternoon-_

 

He says, slowly, “I had a dream about Delilah. The nights we were on the ship.”

 

“You did?”

 

“I’d forgotten.” His third cup of coffee lies half-drunk; the fair-haired woman must be quite sick of them loitering in her bar by now. “She spoke to me. She had your finger on a cord around her neck.” Acid washes the back of his throat at the recollection, filtered through the ethereal pallor of all dreams. “She said she couldn’t reach this far, though.”

 

The Outsider tilts his head. His hand creeps over to Corvo’s and covers it, then he says, “It must be because of your exposure to the Void at the manor. That’s good. Not the dream, but at least she’s revealed something of herself.” The hand tightens. “Come. We should find a map.”

 

They leave the pile of folded and unpeeled newspapers on the bar.

 

Another shop in the plaza sells maps of the city, this one with a grass-green shopfront and a tinkling bell that marks their entrance. Corvo spreads it out against a nearby wall. The rough layout of Karnaca has remained unchanged over the last decades since he left, strips of dense redwood forests and mountain ranges preventing much outward expansion, but the city’s change in leadership has created much internal shift. Districts have changed hands between gangs and Guard and the Abbey; entire streets have been demolished or risen up from the rubble.

 

He understands quite well looking at this new, modern Karnaca the anxiety that kept Alexi standing on the shore at Brigmore Manor and waving them off. Back home, even recovering from an injury, she could rely on her knowledge of Dunwall’s streets - here, she would’ve been at a complete loss. As is he, to a degree.

 

The Conservatory is a half hour’s walk north, a few districts over. “It’s possible she’ll still be in the general area,” he says. “Not near the Conservatory itself, she’s smarter than that, but it’s a place to start looking. We can find a place to stay tonight and look over things. I might be able to predict Emily’s next target, with the right information.”

 

The Outsider nods, and they set off again.

 

~

 

A little west of Cyria Gardens, four blocks from the Royal Conservatory, is the border of a district known colloquially as the Drawing Board. Two streets cross here, lined with specialty shops and boarding houses; tired artists and writers, lapsed on both the rent for their apartments overlooking the titular gardens of Cyria and their inspiration, flow naturally westwards towards easier employment and the camaraderie of other bored lodgers. Not that privacy is hard to find, Corvo is assured.

 

They find themselves in the Drawing Board as noon languishes on into mid-afternoon, and the Outsider picks a curiously unnamed inn from the few scattered about the crossroads for their night’s rest. It is run by an old woman with skin like leather, who warns them not to complain about any noises they might hear during the night - “Plenty here who fancy themselves good with the lute or the bloody harmonica,” she explains. “But we’re not infested, and we’re secure. Grates on all the windows.”

 

Despite her claims, a rat scurries past Corvo’s shoe when he turns the key in their single room. It takes him a short while to realise that she meant bloodflies - a different city, a different plague.

 

The Outsider decides to go back out. To gather information, he says, and promises not to stray outside the district and to come here immediately if anything happens. “I’ll bring food back,” he also says, which Corvo has low expectations for, but he gives him some extra coin.

 

The door closes. To his surprise, the restlessness in his gut blossoms instead of cooling; walking under the Serkonan sun after weeks at sea, keeping pace with the Outsider, has left his body weary to the bone, but his mind runs at full speed. He takes off his pack, sits down on the bed, and lays out their map of the city.

 

There isn’t a chance in hell that Emily isn’t being fed information by somebody, is his first thought. Each of her confirmed targets he marks with a fingernail crease in the map - the Grand Inventor in the Aventa Quarter, Breanna Ashworth. She knows Karnaca, but she doesn’t _know_ Karnaca, wouldn’t clear a swathe through it unless she had a clear goal in mind. At the very least, somebody gave her a first lead to follow, and now Jindosh and Ashworth are dead. But were either of them-

 

“The Crown Killer,” he says to the empty room. She would’ve gone after the Crown Killer first. Best to ensure there is nobody else working at the same time as her, trying to frame her. One of the dead guardsmen - or women - perhaps.

 

If he were Emily, what would he do now? He smoothes out the map. If Ashworth had other witches at the Conservatory, tie up loose ends. If she was a clean kill, he would look for the Abbey connection. There always is one in these things, witches or no, an Overseer who can be bribed or changed enough to look past witchcraft in pursuit of power. Find the Abbey man and cut the thread.

 

They’ll look for her tomorrow, of course. It will be far easier to hear everything from her mouth, wherever her safehouse is. Safeboat, he suspects. Emily left Dunwall by ship, likely with the captain Alexi mentioned to him all those days ago in the tower; each of her targets have been partially accessible by water. Slipping into the Aventa District along the canal, for example, would not be difficult.

 

He is still at his thinking when the Outsider returns, under an evening sky the purple of a bruise. Shockingly, he has edible food with him.

 

“I found another bar,” the Outsider tells him in between setting out bread and fruit and a tiny pillbox of candied beetles. “A man there had a brother in the Grand Guard. He was more than willing to talk about him at length to everybody who would listen.”

 

“He _had_ a brother?”

 

“Stationed at Addermire.” A candied beetle finds its way between the Outsider’s teeth; he crunches it down in a manner that Corvo imagines similar to whales siphoning small sea creatures through their jagged mouths. “Guarding an old and shuttered former haven for the sickly rich. Intended as a retirement post - a graveyard post. Now he’ll be buried in a real graveyard, if my friend can afford it.”

 

“You think Emily killed them.”

 

The Outsider licks a stray speck of beetle leg from his mouth. “I do. There won’t be anything to interest us at Addermire anymore, but there was two and a half weeks ago. It was her first target. Which reminds me,” he reaches over and jabs his finger at a spot on the map. “This is ours. Delilah’s entrance is in this area.”

 

The spot is east of them, and Corvo sighs when he sees exactly where. The old Batista Mining District - of course. The streets where he grew up. With his luck, Delilah will have re-entered the world directly across from his childhood home. “We’ll go after we’ve made a proper search for Emily,” he says.

 

“I’ve sped that up,” the Outsider says. “I told my drunk friend at the bar that the Royal Protector has just arrived in Serkonos, accompanied by a young man with a missing finger, and that they are staying in this district.”

 

Corvo stares at him.

 

“Your daughter has her ear to the ground. I’m sure that within a few days-”

 

“All of our enemies in Karnaca will have knives against our throats?” He can’t even bring himself to be particularly angry at the Outsider. After all, he isn’t wrong - Emily will come to investigate the story if she hears it, purely to make sure she is not being lured into a trap. It might even be the fastest way to meet up with her. He grinds the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Outsi- Void, you could’ve told me before you did something like this.”

 

“I have faith in your ability to keep us safe should we be attacked,” the Outsider says sagely.

 

They finish their meal, and Corvo descends the stairs to stuff paper wrapping and the powder blue pillbox into a communal rubbish bin. He stops for a while before he goes upstairs, listening at the back door for the whistle of the winds through the peak that underscored most other noise when he was young.

 

It is there, but even fainter and muddled in with the footsteps of night travelers outside and the noise of fellow houseguests. Corvo takes a last breath of fresh air and returns to their room, nearly tripping over another rat. Or perhaps the same one, since the Outsider has already extinguished the oil lamp and it is hard to tell rat from floor in the darkness.

 

He slips into bed. The Outsider shifts, rolls onto his side and presses his lips to Corvo’s cheek before resuming his usual sleeping posture: belly-up with his eyelids staring at the ceiling, like a corpse.

 

This is the first night they have spent completely alone, without Alexi or a crew of workers or smugglers stomping over their heads, their first night in a city that is decades past Corvo’s recollections. The kiss is comforting, and it shortens the time Corvo takes to drift off to sleep, to the sounds of their whirring fan and Serkonan night birds.

 

~

 

As he expects, he does not sleep soundly til morning. When he opens his eyes next, there is still nothing but black filtering through their solitary window, covering the bed and single armchair. The Outsider is - most likely - still asleep.

 

Corvo sighs into the silence of the room.

 

Something makes a tiny cracking noise above him, a patter like a rat running inside the walls. He rolls over to his back and blinks up at the blank expanse of wall and ceiling, squinting to try and determine the shape of whatever small nuisance has made its way in.

 

There _is_ something there, he decides, but his eyes aren’t good enough in the dark to see it properly. Pushing up on his elbow, he lights the oil lamp on their bedside table afresh, and looks back up to see something a lot larger than a rat.

 

A woman, hanging from the ceiling by her fingernails, tendrils of red pulsating through her skin like rivers of magma, snarls and leaps towards him.

 

Corvo tumbles aside on instinct and slams into the Outsider, knocking the both of them off the bed. The witch yells again as she lands face-first on the bed; as he scrambles to his feet, she disappears in a shower of ash that does not hit the sheets before also vanishing. The thin beam of light made by the oil lamp illuminates her rematerialisation on the edge of the room. She has a knife.

 

“Royal Protector,” the witch shrieks, bouncing on her heels. “Royal _Arcanist_ ,” she spits, literally, at the Outsider, who is as awake and alert as if he had never been asleep in the first place, crouching beside Corvo. “For the murder of the head of our coven by your craven _bastard_ of a daughter, I’ve come to sentence you to fucking bleed out in a ditch-”

 

She parries Corvo’s first sword stroke well, for a girl who seems otherwise untrained in the blade. He twists and makes to cut off her head, but she is gone, on the other side of the room. A fresh breeze whirls in through the open window.

 

The Outsider produces the copper-coloured flick-knife Fillmore gifted to him before they left Brigmore and moves fast as a snake, slashing at the witch’s ankles. He catches her across the back of one and she cries out again, brings her heel down on his bandaged finger and back further into the bedside table. The oil lamp on the table shakes, and trembles, and then it falls over.

 

The rosewood table, soaked with the residue of a hundred lamp refillings, goes up immediately. The flare of fire laps out and begins to burn the bedsheets as well, then the bedframe, oil-fire running hot enough to char wood in an instant. The witch staggers forward, Blinks with her odd ashy Blink for the window and hurls herself over the sill.

 

Acrid smoke is curling from the rapidly burning wreckage of half their furniture. Corvo says, “Grab our gear and get downstairs,” to the Outsider, spins, and clambers out of the window after the witch. He is still mostly dressed from last night, missing only his boots; he winces as his feet hit hard stone on the street a level below.

 

The witch is still in sight. One of her legs is dragging a little as she sprints away from the inn, heading for an alleyway that he knows from yesterday cuts through to the east, towards Cyria Gardens. He breaks into a run to follow her. His head is pounding with the kind of adrenaline he hasn’t felt in weeks, a pinch of surprise that the Outsider’s lure worked so quickly, and the thick, heady warmth of Karnaca at night.

 

Before he can catch up to the witch however, she turns to see him running after her, sword drawn. Her mouth moves, and grey ash shimmers in the streetlights, and when Corvo stops he hears footsteps pounding in the opposite direction, back towards the inn. The witch is going back - for the Outsider? There is a plume of barely visible smoke drifting from their open second-storey window now.

 

Corvo runs. The few metres he gained on the witch are turned against him; she is under the window and then she is ducking back into it. Barely visible smoke drifts out after her. He curses the Void, curses the useless Mark on the back of his hand and barrels through the inn’s front door, up the stairs, down the corridor - the fire is in full force when he opens the door. “You think I’m afraid of a little _flame_?” the witch is hissing. “You think I’m afraid of anything at all, let alone a brat who thinks he can play at witchcraft?”

 

She has her boot on the Outsider’s wrist, the flick-knife in his hand crushed into the carpet and reflecting the wall of golden flame directly in front of them. She isn’t coughing, that is certain, like the Outsider is and Corvo feels the urge to. The red under her skin burns hotter. “I’ll frost my next cake with your bile, _Royal Arcanist_ ,” and the Outsider releases the flick-knife’s grip under the greater pressure.

 

Corvo shouts, “Hey!” through his hand. It is a mistake. The witch turns, but his sword hand falters, his drive to move stymied by the inhale of smoke he took in by yelling.

 

The witch grins.

 

Behind her, through the open window, a fourth person enters the room.

 

They are dressed in mostly black, a silhouette against the fire. Corvo grips the doorframe and watches, astonished, as the fourth person separates the unaware witch’s head from her body with a single neat stroke, flexing their blade in hand afterwards. They reach down, grab the Outsider by the back of his collar, and drag him bodily out of the room.

 

“How did you get in here?” Corvo says, loud and gravelly. “This is the second floor, you-”

 

The new intruder says, “Zipline.” They drop the Outsider unceremoniously on the corridor’s timber floorboards - he has Corvo’s pack in his other hand, thank goodness - and continue, “That fire’s out of control. You should-”

 

The light in the corridor is not good, but Corvo can still see the instant the woman with a black-and-gold scarf over her face does an enormous double-take. “ _Father?_ ”

 

“ _Emily_?”

 

Her scarf is pulled down and tucked under her collar in a moment, and Emily’s mouth - the mouth she got from him, the brown eyes black at this hour of the morning and under these electric lights - is a confused, amazed smile. “You’re _here_ , Corvo, when did you get here? How long have you been in Serkonos?”

 

“Since this morning.” Grey drifts out from the edges of the door that Emily shut behind her, but Corvo takes no notice of it. He reaches out and touches Emily’s shoulder, to be sure that she’s really there and not an irritation of his eyes from the smoke. She reaches out and pulls him into a hug, all five feet and eleven inches of her. “Void, Emily, it’s good to see you,” he says into her shoulder.

 

Beside them, the Outsider braces himself against the wall and pulls himself to his feet. “Namedropping us worked, then,” he says.

 

“Namedropping?” Emily releases Corvo and looks at him. “Oh, you - you came all the way out here as well?”

 

The Outsider tilts his head.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says, smiling again. For a second, Corvo thinks she’s going to hug him as well. “I actually am glad to see you, too, Ou- Royal Arcanist, but I don’t know what you mean by that. I came here tracking that witch. Amongst others, stragglers from the Royal Conservatory. There’s another nest of them in this area.” She stops herself, replaces the scarf over her face. “But we shouldn’t do this here. I’m sure someone will notice the fire soon.”

 

“You have a safehouse?”

 

“A temporary one. In the next district,” Emily confirms. “Let’s go.”


End file.
